The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology 0199580812, 9780199580811

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The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology

The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology M A R K A . MCI N T O S H

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Mark A. McIntosh 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945725 ISBN 978–0–19–958081–1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Anne, Liza and Nate with all my love and gratitude

Preface When I began the research for this book, I had already grown increasingly concerned that the human community’s response to global climate change was sadly vitiated by denials of truth. Thousands of our fellow beings are under threat because human self-interest seems more than capable of insisting that facts simply cannot be agreed upon. And as I write this preface we are in the midst of a global pandemic whose devastating effects are exacerbated by political choices to deny the realities of nature. I raise these issues because they have partly motivated my aims in researching and writing this book, and because I hope this book will assist others in reclaiming a theological perspective that honors truth with profound reverence. Needless to say, none of the authors I discuss in this work were concerned with our present crises—let alone can I say that they would have certainly stood on one side of an argument or another (e.g., about climate change or systemic racism); nonetheless, I do believe that they all in various ways were devoted to truth in its deepest and most theological sense. And that is no small gift in our present moment. The argument of the book is straightforward: that for at least threequarters of the history of Christian thought, especially in the writings of Christian mystical theologians, truth has been revered as, ultimately, the manifestation of God’s own self-understanding, and that as a direct result of this the beautiful intelligibility and truthfulness of all creatures finds its imperishable ground in God’s infinite knowing of Godself. This perspective, the divine ideas tradition, has allowed Christian theologians, spiritual teachers, and mystics to contemplate the deep and often mysterious reality of our fellow beings in the confidence that their truth could never be wholly distorted or silenced by human mendacity, never finally destroyed by violence or disease, but that the imperishable truth and goodness of every being is sustained eternally in the mind of God. Moreover the divine ideas tradition fostered the conviction that humankind is called to a contemplative vocation, a beholding of our fellow creatures and a reverent search for ever deeper understanding of them, an understanding that must liberate itself from all cultural biases, all forms of prejudice—precisely because the

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truth of all flows directly from the infinite power and goodness of Truth itself, who is God. In ways that I had not expected, this book has become rather more personal—though I hope not less accessible or accurate—than I had imagined it would be. After many years of developing the research I needed to feel even remotely confident in exploring so rich and diverse a tradition, I was diagnosed with ALS, sometimes called motor neuron disease. As my physical incapacities became more challenging, I often wondered about the truth of my own life and how that truth might be grounded in a deeper reality. This is not so different, of course, from our common and beneficial awareness that the truth of our lives is never simply a private matter but subsists in the relationships and experiences we share with others. In some ways, you might say that the divine ideas tradition was and is a theological realization of this awareness on a cosmic scale—the truth-bearing relationships within which our identities come to full expression being none other than the life and relationality of God the Trinity. Besides these thematic reflections, living with ALS also led to very practical impacts: I was increasingly unable to access any of my research notes, the volumes I had glossed with marginal comments, and even eventually to hold a book or turn a page. I am profoundly grateful to three long-time teachers, mentors, and friends—Frank T. Griswold, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Professors Bernard McGinn and David Tracy of the University of Chicago—who encouraged me to forge ahead and write the book that I could write and not be discouraged by the thought of what I was no longer able to achieve. Accordingly this book is simply a theological essay that attempts, in conversation with a limited range of Christian writers and mystical theologians, to elucidate the fundamental role and significance of the divine ideas tradition across the range of Christian doctrines. I had intended and prepared to write a longer book, with the first several chapters devoted to the rich historical unfolding of the divine ideas, from the time of the Middle Platonists to the crisis and transformation of the ideas in the later Middle Ages and early modernity, to the new appropriation of the ideas in the Romantic era, and concluding with an examination of the adoption of this tradition in three twentieth-century writers: Bulgakov, Balthasar, and Merton. The theological essay that I have written was meant to draw upon these earlier historical chapters, which I now hope will find other and undoubtedly more capable authors: there is much more to be discovered and interpreted!

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Much of the initial research for this book was conducted while I served as the Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham University and canon residentiary of Durham Cathedral. I am so grateful to my colleagues in the University and the Cathedral, and to my students and members of the Cathedral congregation, all of whom not only patiently bore my enthusiasms but encouraged me with deep friendship and wisdom. Among my doctoral students at Durham, I’m especially grateful to Rachel Davies for her devoted teaching assistance and for her own profoundly insightful scholarship on the significance of the suffering body in the spirituality and theology of Bonaventure. And above all it gives me great joy to thank another of my PhD students, Benjamin DeSpain, for his remarkable work with all my undergraduate students and for his equally exemplary research assistance; his own doctoral research and dissertation on the divine ideas in Thomas Aquinas provided continual illumination and encouragement, not to mention immeasurable comradeship in a common project. In 2014 Loyola University Chicago, where I had first begun to teach in 1993, invited me to return as the inaugural holder of its Endowed Chair in Christian Spirituality, and I am enormously grateful to my colleagues there for welcoming me back so warmly, and as the ALS developed for such gracious and affectionate support. Although I can no longer move my body, I can still speak and so the University most kindly arranged for dictation software, and for two of my doctoral students to visit me regularly at home. Without their erudite and endlessly patient assistance, this book would have been impossible for me to write. So my deep gratitude goes to John Marshall Diamond for all his help and for all the insights from his own doctoral dissertation, “The Spark and the Darkness: The Relation of the Intellect and Apophaticism in the Theological Anthropology of Meister Eckhart.” And I am especially thankful for all the profoundly skillful and deft assistance of Jacob Torbeck, who went far beyond the call of any doctoral student in assisting my writing—and whose doctoral dissertation has been a rich source of new understandings: “Turn Not Thine Eyes: Holy Faces and Saving Gazes in Mystical and Liberation Theologies.” Since 2014 our family has had the great joy of being members of the Christian community of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Evanston, and I can never sufficiently express our gratitude for all their kindness, care, and support. This is equally true of all the colleagues, former students, and friends, both in the UK and the US, whose many expressions of prayer and affectionate encouragement have meant so very much.

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Caring for my daily needs has grown into quite a job and I could never have finished this book without the gracious caregiving of Christine Ogunbola and Evangelist Emeka Okere. For over a year now, Emeka has been with me every day and his patience, skill, good humor, and Christian friendship have made all the difference to me and our family. The existence of this book is due to the endless love and companionship of my family: my brothers and sister and their spouses—Gib and Sylvia, Bruce and Priscilla, Kathy and Tom, you have been with me every step of the way. And above all, I am grateful beyond all words to my beloved wife, Anne, and our two wonderful children, Liza and Nate. Anne has made life possible for me and has been my dearest friend since we first met; her generous love has given me life and the will to complete this work. To all three of them I dedicate this book, for they have been the most intimate and constant sign of what God’s love must be like. In a season of considerable challenge for our world and for so many of us individually, I hope more than I can say that readers may find within these pages good cause to seek all that is true, and just, and beautiful.

Acknowledgments During the course of my research for this volume, I was able to develop initial arguments for several aspects of the work. Portions of this book appeared in these earlier forms and I am grateful to be able to draw upon them here. These were originally published as the following: “Mystical Theology at the Heart of Theology,” chapter 2 in The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology, co-editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 25–44. “The Father’s Vindication of the Word,” chapter 6 in Christian Dying, ed. George Kalantzis and Matthew Levering (Eugene, OR, Cascade Books, 2018), pp. 124–133. “The Contemplative Turn in Ficino and Traherne,” in The Renewal of Mystical Theology: Essays in Memory of John N. Jones, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Crossroad, 2017), pp. 162–176. “Beautiful Ideas: The Visibility of Truth,” in The Recovery of Beauty, ed. Corinne Saunders (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 21–34. “The Maker’s Meaning: Divine Ideas and Salvation,” Modern Theology, vol. 28/3 (July 2012): 365–384. While continuing the research for this book I was also honored to deliver the following lectures, all of which were important steps in the development of my thinking and interpretation, and I am very grateful to the original audiences for their conversation and insights. “Green Trinity: Creation’s Mending and Trinitarian Life in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The DuBose Lectures 2017, endowed lecture series, three plenary addresses, The University of the South, the School of Theology, Sewanee, TN, September 27–28, 2017. “Mystics and the Mind of God,” The 2015 Belk Lecture (Plenary Address), Wesleyan College, Georgia, September 22, 2015. “Divine Ideas and the Incarnation,” Paper for Templeton Foundation Colloquium, Copenhagen, 2011. “The Artisan’s Design: Creation in the Mind of God,” Plenary Address, British Patristics Society, Durham University, September 2010.

Introduction Sometimes old academic debates, seemingly consigned with relief (on all sides) to the dusty realms of historical curiosities, spring astonishingly to life. I believe we are in one of those moments. The goodness and beauty of our planet have been exploited so grievously as to lay bare, with raw and urgent relevance, our apparent obliviousness of older views—theological visions that would have regarded the goodness and beauty of each creature, not as merely a construction of human value, appreciated or dismissed according to economic reasons, but as the radiant epiphany of the divine goodness and beauty from which all creatures flow. In fatal correlation to the denial of the planet’s real goodness and vulnerable beauty, we find an equally devastating denial of the truth about what helps or harms the planet’s well-being. In fact the rampant abuse of truth in the digital age seems to be encouraging an online arms race of misinformation, in which narratives are asserted not because they are true but because they are a badge of one’s faction against all others. So, for example, an entire online “community” has been built up around the grotesque denial of truth regarding the mass shooting of children in schools across America—not only denying solace and respect for the victims and their families, but perpetuating a cloud of obfuscation that seems to cloak authentic amelioration of the problem in impossibility, precisely because the actual facts are continually distorted. For most of the history of Christian thought, especially amongst the teachers of Christian mystical theology, truth, goodness, and beauty appear in our world with a sovereign majesty that calls forth human reverence, and a profound human desire to understand the sacramental depth of meaning inherent in all creation. In order to think and teach more profoundly about this divine resonance within all beings, and about the human calling to contemplate and revere this fullness of meaning, Christian mystical theologians often drew upon their belief in God as Trinity. God’s life, they taught, is a life of infinite knowing and loving, a relational life in which the divine Persons are as they enact the inexhaustible self-giving that is existence itself. In this eternal and perfect life of knowing and loving, the processions of the

The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology. Mark A. McIntosh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Mark A. McIntosh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.003.0001

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divine Word and Holy Spirit, God also knows and loves from eternity all the ways in which creatures come to share in a likeness to God, by God’s gift to them of finite existence in time. In the mind or Word of God are the divine ideas of all that ever has been or will be, not as moments of foreknowledge about things that will come to pass, but as the Father’s infinite selfunderstanding and self-giving in the Son and their mutual joyful love in the Spirit. The divine ideas, in other words, are not dependent on creaturesto-be, but rather creatures come to be because God eternally knows and loves the truth of God, including the truth of God’s gift of existence to other beings. So the divine ideas teaching allowed its exponents to contemplate with reverence and wonder the goodness, truth, and beauty of our fellow creatures because it taught that at the core of every being is the continual speaking of its imperishable truth in God, the intelligible form or idea by which God thinks and creates each being. In the preface I have explained briefly why this book must leave to others the rich historical contextualization, the philosophical problematics, and the biblical foundations with which I would have liked to approach the divine ideas tradition.¹ For good or ill this is a shorter book than it might have been, and perhaps it would most kindly be received as simply a theological essay, a conversation with several of the most outstanding teachers of the divine ideas tradition. There are, however, at least two possible misimpressions that my necessary approach to discussing the divine ideas may unintentionally give, and I hope that by alerting readers to these in advance I may mitigate the problem. First, and most obviously, by working with a fairly narrow group of thinkers, and highlighting points of intrinsic coherence among their different approaches to the divine ideas, I might give readers the impression of a far greater homogeneity than I mean to suggest. It goes without saying that each author reflects the very different historical and theological contexts in which they wrote, and while I wish to draw readers’ attention to the broad family resemblance among their approaches to the divine ideas, I certainly would not wish to imply that they are always of one mind on every issue. The second possible misimpression stems from my desire to illustrate how the divine ideas teaching might be extended into our contemporary discussions, and how matters which are implicit in ancient or medieval treatments of the divine ideas might suggest ways forward for us today. I hope readers will easily sense when I am drawing out notions that are perhaps implicit in our authors, but which represent my own attempt to advance a discussion about the potential significance of the divine ideas in Christian mystical theology. This second issue may arise particularly

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because I have, fairly consistently throughout the book, attempted to show the possible role of the divine ideas in thinking about the death and resurrection of Christ; and while, as we will see, a thinker such as Bonaventure does make a rich and direct use of the divine ideas in that context, other thinkers whom I treat are less explicit in this regard. In short, I hope readers will find my constructive engagement with these important historical figures to be intriguing and suggestive but not misleading; perhaps in a case such as this forewarned is forearmed, and I am grateful for the reader’s patience and imagination as I attempt to make my case. Readers familiar with ancient and medieval Christianity will immediately recognize the book’s structure as attempting to follow the path of PseudoDionysius and Thomas Aquinas, striving to articulate a theological pattern that mirrors what they and I believe to be the dynamic structure of existence itself—coming forth from the infinite Existence we call God and returning to God along the way pioneered, Christians believe, by Jesus through the Spirit. Accordingly, the first chapter introduces the divine ideas tradition as grounded in the Trinitarian life of God (and also offers some important clarifications about the nature of my argument). The second chapter investigates the way in which the divine ideas teaching inflects the Christian understanding of creation, as well as offering some attempt to think about the historical marginalization of this perspective in the late medieval and early modern periods. Chapter 3 argues that the Incarnation and Paschal mystery fundamentally reconstitute the divine ideas within Christological and Trinitarian modes of reflection, and the chapter further proposes that it is on these doctrinal grounds that the divine ideas teaching might prove a helpful rediscovery. Chapter 4 explores more fully how the resurrection of Christ, considered through the lens of the divine ideas tradition, can be seen as re-creating and bringing to life the truth of all creatures; further, the chapter suggests that the Christian community, desiring to share ever more fully in Christ’s dying and rising, develops a new understanding of humanity’s contemplative calling—so that a continual conversion of contemplative consciousness collaborates in Christ’s re-harmonizing of creation with God’s knowing and loving of each creature. The final chapter suggests how the divine ideas permit mystical theology to envision a fourfold analogy of intelligibility: in the mind of God, in human (and angelic) acts of understanding, in the vindication of Christ (through his resurrection) as the truth of God and of creation, and in the consummation of the human desire to know the truth in the vision of God.

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At the heart of the argument in this essay are a number of material convictions about the substance of the divine ideas teaching but also some hypotheses about the formal significance of the divine ideas—that is hypotheses about the particular role the divine ideas teaching has played and why that might be so. For example, a central material implication of the divine ideas tradition is that theology can and should respect the loving and lovable gratuity at the ground of all creatures—because it is the echo within them of the loving freedom of their Author. What the divine ideas tradition serves to do, in an instance such as this, is to help us contemplate precisely this crucial nexus between the creatures, in all their particularity and vulnerable cherishability in time, and the eternally free activity of knowing and loving by which God is God and in virtue of which the creatures have their existence. In the Christian tradition, I’m arguing, precisely because the ideas are God’s own knowledge of how every creature participates in the divine self-sharing of existence, the ideas can be seen as inherently imbued with the self-communicating and relational agency of the Trinitarian life in which they are eternally known and loved. So, I will argue later in this book, the embodied historical struggle of every creature to discover and to be its true self, to communicate the vivacious idea at its core, is never left behind but is integral to its consummate realization, to its fullness of life. And as the creature fully lives into its self-communication, this true life surges past all false selves constructed by sin and prejudice and violence of every kind, and onwards into the inexhaustible self-sharing of its truth; for the truth at the heart of every creature is God’s eternal and imperishable knowing and loving of it, and this is the life from which it flows and which, Christians believe, God intends it to enjoy forever. Among the many uses and attributes of the divine ideas teaching, one in particular, I suspect, may have given rise to its near ubiquity in the history of Christian thought prior to modernity. This is the fact that the divine ideas function for Christian teachers and mystics as a way of thinking about and indeed, contemplating, the communion among God, creatures, and the human person. Within each corner of this metaphorical triangle of communion, the ideas have both a metaphysical function (explaining how things come to exist as what they are) and also a noetic or epistemological function (explaining how the truth of things can be known). In God, the divine ideas are understood by the tradition to exist as an aspect of God’s knowing of Godself, and within that eternal self-understanding in the Word, all the ways in which creatures might come to participate in or imitate the divine reality. If theologians are contemplating the ideas as the causes of all creatures, they

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may refer to the ideas as exemplars or archetypes, being as it were the blueprints by which God brings the creatures into their individual finite existence. But if theologians are contemplating the ideas primarily as intelligible forms within God’s eternal knowing, then the ideas may be referred to as the eternal reasons, namely, the ideas by which God knows the truth of all the creatures precisely as aspects of God’s own essence. I emphasize that this distinction, with respect to God, between the metaphysical and the epistemological is of course purely a matter of human focus: in God, for our thinkers, being and knowing are simply one reality. These two aspects, the noetic and the metaphysical, are also present in the second corner of this triangle of cosmic communion: namely, in the creatures themselves. For at the heart of every creature is the divine exemplar that causes it to be precisely and wonderfully what it is; and looked at noetically, this creative exemplar can also be understood as the creature’s intelligible form, the idea by which it may be rightly and fully understood in all its truth. At the third corner of our metaphor of cosmic communion, we have the rational creatures: angels, and more particular to our purposes, human beings—for the human person, who shares in the sensible, physical reality of all other creatures, is also able to recognize the creature’s intelligible form or idea, and this, when actualizing the mind of a human knower, instantiates a link or moment of communion among the creature who exists intelligibly in the mind of the human knower, the knower herself, and God’s own knowing and loving, from which both the creature and its human contemplator flow. I’m suggesting then that God’s knowing and loving freely communicates itself, both in the finite creaturely expression of the divine ideas, and in the transformation of consciousness that the contemplation of the ideas in creation brings about. And in this way, Christians believe, God nurtures a consciousness of the hidden divine presence in all beings, and the possibility of ever fuller communion among creatures, and between creatures and God. While the divine ideas have sometimes been the subject of profound philosophical analysis in the history of Christian thought, this book is an effort to understand the role of the divine ideas teaching in Christian mystical theology—an effort, that is, to notice and interpret the role of the ideas in the thought of Christian mystical teachers, who have sought to awaken their fellow Christians to God’s hidden or mystical presence within all things, deepening the contemplative response to God’s presence. As we will see throughout this book, the exponents of the divine ideas teaching compass a wide range of understandings with respect to both the

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metaphysical and the noetic aspects of the divine ideas. While I will seldom devote much attention to fine distinctions in this regard, it may be helpful to readers to consider for a moment the diversity of positions that might be possible and how they interact with each other—that is, to consider the reciprocal influence of particular stances on both the metaphysical and noetic issues in thinking about the divine ideas. As a way of making this more evident, we might consider a diagram with two axes as displayed below: a. Theophany Y

d. consciousness participating in divine ideas

c. individualist consciousness

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b. Only imitation / No participation

Considering the vertical (a–b) axis, we can think of the upper reaches as perspectives that understand creaturely reality as itself a theophany, an expression in finite form of God’s own reality. In this view, the divine ideas are expressed in time in individualized, finite form, within every creature. At the other end of this axis (b), would be the perspective that understands finite reality as not participating in the actual divine being, but rather as imitating it—like a self-portrait by a painter, or a recording of a singer, the creation is not the expression of the immediate presence of the divine, but only imitates it in some way. In this perspective, then, the divine ideas are not directly present within each creature but are only reflected or echoed at the heart of each creature. Turning to the horizontal axis (c–d), the leftmost position represents human consciousness that is entirely untouched by divine illumination and experiences reality from the individualist perspective of a human ego looking “out” at all other beings as “objects,” either of attractive or repellent significance. This perspective is, by most of our thinkers, understood to be profoundly vitiated by sin, turning the subject–object division in human

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consciousness into a mindset marred by fear and antagonism towards the other. At the other end (d) is the perspective of a participant sharing in God’s own knowing and loving of all reality, and understanding the divine truth of every creature from that wholistic and loving vantage point. This perspective is especially marked by its embrace of the unified diversity of reality as the wholly beneficent expression of divine infinity. In other words, it experiences reality as liberated from division or enmity and as entirely one within the divine embrace. If we look at the trajectory marked by the arrow moving from X to Y, we can use that to trace the sort of progression sought by such important thinkers in the divine ideas tradition as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Hadewijch, or Eckhart. This progression shows the intrinsic link between the shift in contemplative consciousness and the apprehension of reality in a completely different manner. The spiritual journey, in other words, means not simply a change in what one sees, but in the knower herself: as consciousness shares more fully in God’s own knowing and loving, so too the actual presence of that knowing and loving at the heart of each creature becomes more vividly apparent. My hope is that this highly oversimplified discussion will assist readers in pondering the mutually implicating significance of these two aspects of the divine ideas teaching, thus allowing us to notice more easily what is at stake in the different stances adopted and encouraged by our writers. As I have just suggested, Christian thinkers often find an intrinsic connection between the divine ideas teaching and the human calling to contemplate reality and find God in all things. Moreover, as I will suggest in Chapter 1, the divine ideas are far more present implicitly throughout the whole range of Christian teaching than any particular explicit references to them might suggest. And this combination, namely their intrinsic dynamic towards contemplation and their implicit presence within almost every area of Christian belief, means that the divine ideas seem to function throughout Christian theology as invitations into the divine presence. The divine ideas teaching, I am arguing, holds open within theology what we might think of as a hidden spiritual door in every doctrinal locus—a threshold across which reflection on doctrine passes onwards towards an encounter with the living mystery to which the doctrine is meant to guide believers. We get a good glimpse of the phenomenon I’m pointing to in this passage from William of St. Thierry (c.1085–1148): When the object of thought is God and the things which relate to God and the will reaches the stage at which it becomes love, the Holy Spirit, the

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William evokes the circumstances in which so much of Christianity’s theological reflection was achieved in the era between the age of the Mothers and Fathers of the Church and the high scholastic period of the later Middle Ages. Note the carefully limned sequence that William suggests a person might perceive, and, undoubtedly, acknowledge with the most profound gratitude: the mind gives itself to thinking about God and “the things which relate to God,” but as this happens, the heart is overtaken with love for that infinite goodness of God that the mind’s thoughts had conceived as truth but never fully comprehended. The infinite beauty of God’s life, that the mind meets as dazzling truth, the will tastes as Wisdom’s generous and loving goodness. In such moments, says William, it is the Holy Spirit who as the divine love “infuses” Godself and “gives life to everything.” What is this “everything”? William describes here, I believe, the optimum theological moment, when “the understanding of the one thinking becomes the contemplation of the one loving,” when the theological labor of the earthly church is welcomed, for a moment at least, into the consummate joy of its sisters and brothers who now see what can by wayfarers only be believed. I want to suggest that for most of the history of Christianity, the divine ideas, present as an aspect of the central beliefs of Christian faith, were particularly apt means for thinking to be strengthened by loving, for understanding to expand into that living encounter we call contemplation. As God’s own “thoughts” (albeit of course conceived anthropomorphically but still analogically), the divine ideas are very rarely considered by our authors to be knowable in and of themselves by human knowers—they would be too overwhelmingly charged with the infinite reality of God; yet the divine ideas are by our authors considered to befriend and illuminate the human mind in search of understanding. And this very thought of the ideas, in generous love beckoning the mind and heart towards Wisdom’s banquet, infuses Christians—who thus come to recognize the ideas as they are embodied within time and space, kindling within believers an ardent desire to behold the full radiance of the ideas as they exist imperishably in the

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divine knowing and loving. Let me now offer a somewhat fuller example of this formal quality of the divine ideas teaching, namely its propensity to encourage theology to open towards the mystery it seeks to understand. In the Galilee Chapel at the west end of Durham Cathedral lie the mortal remains of St. Bede the Venerable (672–735). Amid the solemn beauty of the chevroned Romanesque arches, inscribed over his tomb are words from Bede’s own commentary on the Book of Revelation: “Christ is the Morning Star who, when the night of this world is past, brings to his saints the promise of the light of life, and opens everlasting day.” Bede had devoted his life to understanding the nature of time and its relation to eternity, and to depicting the long, tempestuous historical struggle of Christians realizing their common identity in his land. In believing that Christ would bring people to everlasting life when time finally blossoms into eternity, Bede was far from devaluing the daily challenges and joys of mortal life. He was, rather, unfolding the power of the one whom Christians believe to be the incarnate Word to bring beings to life, to life conceived as a kind of radiant power of light, vision, a sharing in what Bede understood to be God’s own delight in God. For Bede this life-aseternal-vision, life as sharing in infinite self-communication, was beginning now within time. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Bede writes cherishingly of all who, perhaps with costly effort, give of themselves to help the simplest members of a community receive what they need to live and grow. Bede describes Jesus loving such benefactors as the Lover loves the Bride in the Song of Songs, thinking of such a giving person as “a sister and a bride” who is “joined to him in love,” imitating his own costly selfcommunication; “for he also did not shrink from becoming weak for a time so that he might change us from weak to strong, and even to die so that we might live.” Jesus, says Bede, and all who imitate him, are like a mother who communicates food and life to an infant by the intimate sharing of her milk; for a child cannot yet feed upon the full plenitude of life-giving food. Then Bede draws an important contrast between the nourishing of angels and mortals: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn 1:1); this is the eternal food that refreshes the angels because they are satisfied with the sight of his glory. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14), so that in this way the Wisdom of God, who consoles us as a mother, may refresh us from that very same bread [enjoyed

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     by angels] and lead us through the sacraments of the incarnation to the knowledge and vision of divine splendor.³

God’s self-communication, the Word and Wisdom of God, communicates herself as a mother breast-feeds her child. Notice here how Bede holds together the contemplative vision of the angels, feasting on the divine beatitude of infinitely self-sharing life, with the tenderly embodied continuation of that self-sharing life made available for humankind: Wisdom converts the heavenly food into milk for her earthly children through her incarnation, and through the intimately physical expression of Jesus’ embodied self-sharing life in the sacraments. The angels nurse on the eternal vision of God’s infinite Trinitarian self-sharing; humans nurse on the same food—and it leads them ultimately to the same “knowledge and vision of divine splendor”—but as it comes to bestow life within them through the bodily life of Wisdom in time. Bede’s words point to a powerful revolution in the common inheritance of the Mediterranean world, a transformation wrought by Christian belief in the Incarnation of the Word. The ancient Platonic contemplative priority accorded to disembodied, ahistorical truth had by the age of Bede come to be handed over, in astonished recognition, to the loving self-giving One whom Christians believed had become incarnate in the historical human life of Jesus. But as Bede suggested above, the angelic contemplation of the divine ideas of all creation was no longer the full reach of Wisdom’s selfcommunication, for Christians would see in the Incarnation a loving divine initiative to share eternal truth within the embodied struggles of an earthly life. The Platonic forms had not simply been converted into ideas within the divine mind or Word, they had been carried and embodied in the historical self-giving of the divine Word made flesh. Thus the meaning and significance of the divine ideas tradition in Christianity cannot adequately be realized by attention to the usual philosophical questions derived from reflections on the Platonic forms. The Christological revolution that the ideas undergo in Christian theology and spirituality means that they carry far more weight than, say, tokens in a discussion about how or if human minds can arrive at unchanging truth beyond transitory experiences (as in, e.g., the Parmenides) or how this world, all appearances to the contrary, can be seen as a good and fitting expression of an ideal (as in the Timaeus). Christ the Word incarnate, who bears within himself God’s eternal knowing and loving of every creature, draws the whole world to himself; in his dying, sin’s mendacious and abusive

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grip on every creature is undone and, in his rising, the deep truth and goodness of every creature is vindicated and brought fully to life. This, I believe, is the upshot of the Christological constitution of the divine ideas; and it suggests that far from diminishing the significance of embodied finite existence, the ideas in Christ are crucial elements in recognizing and renewing creation’s goodness. In the following chapters, then, I hope to show how the divine ideas teaching functions implicitly or explicitly across the full range of Christian beliefs about the journey in the Word of all creatures from God to God. Whether the plausibility structures of our current world of thought might sustain a use of the divine ideas teaching at all comparable to that of earlier eras I must leave to others to determine. But it will be worthwhile in any case to understand the theological and spiritual significance of a tradition so widely cherished for so long by so many.

Notes 1. For extremely clarifying brief introductions to the divine ideas tradition, see the following: Bernard McGinn, “Platonic and Christian: The Case of the Divine Ideas,” in Of Scholars, Savants, and their Texts: Studies in Philosophy and Religious Thought, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 163–172; Mark Jordan, “The Intelligibility of the World and the Divine Ideas in Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 38, no. 1 (1984): 17–32; and Douglas Hedley, “Symbol, Participation and Divine Ideas,” Chapter 5 in The Iconic Imagination (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 119–148. 2. William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu, §249, trans. Theodore Berkeley (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 92. 3. The Venerable Bede, On the Song of Songs and Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Arthur Holder (New York: Paulist Press, 2011), 123.

1 The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christianity The Divine Ideas in the Mystery of the Trinity In every century since the birth of Christianity, Christian thinkers and spiritual teachers have drawn creatively upon a now somewhat mysterious aspect of Christian teaching called by many names, but often by the simple phrase, “the divine ideas.” In this book I am seeking to understand how, within the broader sweep of Christian theology and spirituality, the divine ideas tradition played so significant a role—and why a renewed understanding of this tradition might be helpful today. This tradition, in its most basic form, held that in God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself, that is, in the eternal begetting of the Word and breathing forth of the Spirit, God also knows and loves all the ways in which creatures might participate in God’s life through God’s gift to each creature of existence. My aim is not to focus in a narrow way only upon the term “divine ideas” or its various cognates; I suggest rather that what I am loosely referring to as the divine ideas tradition takes manifold forms within multiple Christian beliefs, playing a notable role in a much broader Trinitarian vision of reality: in this view, Christians have understood the whole universe as the expression in time and space of God’s infinite activity of knowing and loving, that is, of God being the Trinity. This means that there is a rich depth of intelligibility in creation that rational creatures (humans and angels in particular) are able to apprehend and appreciate; and it means that there is an ultimate truth of all creatures, recoverable beyond all the world’s incoherence and violence—a living truth that is imperishably known and loved in God’s beloved Child from eternity, incarnate in Christ yet rejected by the world, and finally vindicated and brought to newness of life in Christ’s resurrection. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) gives a particularly clear articulation of this Trinitarian vision of the cosmos in which, I’m arguing, the divine ideas tradition plays a significant role: The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology. Mark A. McIntosh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Mark A. McIntosh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.003.0002

     

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As the Father speaks himself and every creature by his begotten Word, inasmuch as the Word begotten adequately represents the Father and every creature; so he loves himself and every creature by the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as the Holy Spirit proceeds as the love of the primal goodness whereby the Father loves himself and every creature.¹

Note the exaltedly Trinitarian ground of the creatures: for Thomas, the divine speaking of all creatures flows forth in an everlasting unity within God’s own perfect Speech or Word of God, springing precisely from God’s perfect knowing of Godself and God’s perfect loving of God’s goodness. We know and love creatures because they exist, but for Thomas (as for the whole of Christian theology), creatures exist because of God’s knowing and loving of God. This divine knowing and loving is infinite, inexhaustible, and comprehensive of every possible manner in which finite existence could participate in the divine self-giving. Indeed, that is what the act of creation means. To exist as a creature at all means to express in time and space this infinite intimacy with God: to be a creature means to flow forth from an idea in the eternal Word’s perfect expression of the Father, perfectly beloved in the Spirit. As a foremost expositor of Thomas’ thought, John Wippel writes: “According to Aquinas a divine idea is nothing but a given way in which God understands himself as capable of being imitated by a creature. Hence the essence of any existing creature is an expression of a particular way in which the divine idea can be imitated and in fact is imitated.”² It’s important to understand that when Augustine, say, or Maximus or Hadewijch or Aquinas or Eckhart or Catherine of Siena, or dozens of other Christian thinkers and mystics speak of God’s eternal ideas of all finite beings, they do not mean that God is forever taking a close look at everything that ever has been or will be and so is able to form a clear idea of it. Nor do they mean that God has a rigid and alien plan for each creature to which it will be forced inevitably to conform. On the contrary, the Christian teachers who use the language of the divine ideas do not mean that God’s ideas are derived from creatures nor that they are imposed upon them. Rather they mean that God, in eternally knowing and loving God, in eternally begetting the Word and breathing forth the Spirit, eternally knows and loves all the ways in which God’s own life may come to be shared and imitated by all which is not God. We might almost say it is as if God, in contemplating the inexhaustible existence of God, understands and cherishes the innumerable ways in which the divine existence may become the ceaselessly giving ground of each finite being. What God knows in the Word and

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cherishes in the Spirit is God’s own essence, including each and every aspect in which that infinite existence will become manifest in time and space. To offer an admittedly inadequate analogy, we might imagine a great novelist whose artistry flows from her profound self-awareness; she has a deep understanding and acceptance of her own life and her essential characteristics. This wisdom about herself is the source of her creativity. For in thus knowing and embracing her own being she is able to draw with immense creative power and insight upon her own passion for justice, for example, or her experiences of wonder or great achievement, and projecting these into the world of her novels she brings into being characters of matchless and indelible reality. We could even say that her characters have all the more life and agency of their own precisely because they spring from the novelist’s own life. Were she to understand herself less completely or to accept this truth of herself less generously, or were she less able to bring these expressions of herself into the world of her novels, her characters would be all the less real and lively themselves—becoming instead mere caricatures with little sense of inner consciousness. Perhaps this authorial analogy allows us to glimpse in a preliminary way some important points about the divine ideas teaching. We might think of these as basic grammatical principles for understanding the proper usage of the divine ideas tradition in the discourse of its exponents. First, creatures are derived from God’s knowing and loving of Godself and not vice versa; so in our analogy, the author doesn’t look around inside her novels to get the ideas for her characters, rather the characters flow from her consciousness of herself. This is particularly important as of course most of our experience of knowing depends entirely upon there already being things in the world for us to know; and so it would be easy though fatal to think that, analogously, God simply foresees the existence of all possible and actual creatures and that the divine ideas are accordingly derived from the creatures rather than from God’s own Trinitarian knowing and loving of Godself. It is highly significant that William of Ockham (1287–1347), in his radical critique of the divine ideas tradition, seems to have made exactly this move; as I will suggest in more detail in the next chapter, the effects of this approach, which comes to be known as the via moderna or Nominalist position, were consequential and far-reaching—precipitating a theological conception in which nature becomes severed from grace, and the Trinitarian matrix of creation and salvation is obscured. Second, the author and her characters are obviously not in competition for existence and agency, for it is precisely the author’s thinking and willing

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of her characters that continuously resources their life and activity within the world of her novels; analogously, God’s idea for each being is not some alien decree imposed upon the creature but rather the source of its own life and authentic reality—God’s will for every creature is simply that it should be fully and vibrantly itself. If God and the creatures were on the same plane of existence—that is, if God were another being alongside the others, only greater or more powerful—then God’s activity would indeed be external to each creature and thus in potential conflict with the creature’s own existence and agency. But of course, Christians believe, God is not one among other existing beings but the reason why there is anything at all rather than nothing; and so God’s authoring idea and cherishing will at the heart of every creature’s existence is the continual source of its life and agency. A particularly important implication of this observation is that the more a creature is able to attend and respond to its authentic truth in God, the more fully and freely it is able to flourish. As we will see the implications of this insight for Christian mystical theology have been singularly profound. Third, while a great novelist develops many ideas for all the characters in her novels, in another and deeper sense we should say that all her characters flow from one profound idea, that is, her deep understanding of her own consciousness. Analogously the divine ideas tradition argues that while God creates and sustains each creature according to the unique idea or exemplar of how that individual creature shares in the divine gift of existence, it is true in the deepest sense that all creatures flow from one eternal act of God’s understanding of Godself, one eternal begetting of the Word. Crucially for the argument of this book, this means that the divine ideas teaching holds that the ideas of all creatures exist within the one eternal Idea that God has of Godself, namely within the eternal Word of God—and, conversely, that the one eternal Word who speaks the truth of every creature exists immanently within all creatures. We could add that each individual creature echoes the one Word in its own unique way. This means also that the incarnate Word, Jesus of Nazareth, bears within himself the deep truth of every creature. Fourth, just as the world of novels created by a great author bears within it certain recognizable motifs, characteristics of her imagination and art, so the divine ideas teaching holds that the universe, flowing from the divine Author’s knowing and loving, is luminously “sign-full,” bearing the character of intelligent speech or communication. This feature of the divine ideas teaching sustains another fundamental feature of Christian mystical theology: namely, that humankind has a contemplative calling—to learn by grace

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how to hear the divine speaking in the creation so as ultimately to hear the Word directly whom we now, Christians believe, hear through the mediation of our fellow creatures.

Clarifying Ideas Before going any farther I’d like to offer two clarifications. They are doubtless rather obvious, but bearing them in mind has helped to keep me from misreading the divine ideas tradition, or at least from failing to attempt an understanding of it in its best light. The first clarification simply involves reminding ourselves of the analogical context within which the divine ideas are considered. It would be easy to conjure a ridiculous picture of God rummaging through a few ideas at the back of the divine mind in order, say, to come up with the right notion of a particular solar system or giraffe. Such anthropomorphic notions are not meant to be strawmen but a reminder: of course our language about the divine ideas is only a placeholder, a way of gesturing inadequately but in the right direction towards a divine reality that wonderfully exceeds our conceptual grasp—even while we attempt to speak. We have to keep remembering that while we need to state certain facts about God, for example that God knows and loves all things, the language we use to declare such truths may sound as if it were an explanation of realities in God—when in fact it is really an explanation of how we try to think about God when stating what we believe to be true. All this is my way of suggesting that rather than allowing the more exuberant speculations of the divine ideas tradition to nudge us, perhaps, towards disquiet or even chilly disdain, we might instead recognize the authors of such language as delighting in what they believe to be true about God, explaining with as much insight as they can how they think about it, and why they think this truth about God to be intelligible—while yet remaining boldly confident that God alone can ever explain God. The second clarification is equally obvious yet more complicated to elucidate: namely that there is a considerable, and indeed surprising, difference between our present modern notion of an idea and the constellation of meanings the term holds for most of the thinkers we are considering. So in order for us to see with any adequacy how the divine ideas could have played the role they did in Christian theology and spirituality, I need to reflect a bit about how our own modern notions of “ideas” might require some expansion or at least self-awareness.³

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In the first place, if Christian theology in our era considers the role of ideas much at all, it is usually within the framework of epistemological problems proffered to theology by philosophy, often taken up within the pre-doctrinal concerns of fundamental theology. In other words, we have to reckon with the fact that systematic theology in modernity is most likely to consider ideas not as they might be understood within Trinitarian or Christological reflection but primarily in terms our contemporary presuppositions about ideas as private mental objects of our own. Moreover, the specifically theological role of the ideas is often obscured by the hardworking (and in their own terms, perfectly outstanding) efforts of historians of philosophy—who, in fairness, are usually the only scholars likely to devote much time to the ideas; for them, the function of the ideas tradition can be largely sorted into major puzzles over ontology and epistemology. Consider just one excellent example: One of the central issues, or indeed the central issue in Plato’s philosophy is the question of how to account for the stability and unity of the seemingly unstable and ever changing world. How could we attain knowledge if there were no stable object? And how could the world be what it is, if it were not grounded on stable principles? It is common knowledge that Plato answers both these questions, an epistemological one and an ontological one, by his theory of the Forms. From an epistemological viewpoint, the Forms constitute the objects of true knowledge. They display the unity and the stability needed to ground solid knowledge. From an ontological point of view, they are the principles that underlie the order of the universe.⁴

This is a wonderfully clear introduction. Leaving aside the much debated question of whether indeed Plato ever intended to develop a “theory of the Forms,” many of his most eminent interpreters in the ancient world certainly did develop a rich and sophisticated theory of the forms. They came to understand the forms or ideas as playing crucial roles, some with highly significant points of contact in developing Christianity; but, as the passage just above suggests, there is a tendency among the best scholars of the ideas to consider them, even in their most robust Neoplatonic versions, as a hypothesis to account for some difficulties—always puzzling, problematic in origin, contested in validity, and in any case deeply enmeshed in the professional disciplinary thickets of philosophical metaphysics and epistemology. Given such a reputation, it’s not surprising if historical and systematic theologians tend generally to give the divine ideas a fairly wide berth,

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or treat them warily as a specialized enthusiasm best left for those fascinated by, for example, the Augustinian illumination theory of knowledge or beguiled by the complicated speculations of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). Inconveniently, however, for most of the history of Christian thought, the divine ideas do seem to have had a connective role at the intersection of many central Christian doctrines, and this is why, I’m suggesting, Christian theology ought to consider them within their properly doctrinal matrix. There is a further hindrance to our present ability to recognize this connective role in theology—or indeed how the divine ideas could be anything more than a curious legacy of long-vanished worlds of thought. This is a yet deeper hermeneutical issue that we must patiently engage more or less throughout this book. In its most basic form, we could say that the problem is that almost none of the thinkers whom we will consider in this book mean the same thing as we do when they and we use the word “idea.”⁵ For us, as I mentioned above, “ideas” are likely to be what we call our own mental representations, within our own minds. The historian and philosopher Anthony Kenny once observed with disarming frankness that the word “idea” as we commonly use it today has a very different meaning from its earlier uses. Our modern use “derives, through Locke, from Descartes; and Descartes was consciously giving it a new sense. Before him, philosophers used it to refer to archetypes in the divine intellect; it was a new departure to use it systematically for the contents of a human mind.”⁶ And we might add, not only philosophers but theologians understood ideas in this premodern way: as “archetypes in the divine intellect.” For the figures we’re considering, ideas are the intelligible truth of things in which our thinking participates whenever it knows something. Ideas for them are not private mental objects that represent and indeed constitute an otherwise unknowable external world but, rather, ideas are the divinelyoriginated, universal, and communicative truth of things—a truth so illuminating that it is capable of drawing the mind towards its fulfillment precisely by actualizing the mind according to this truth. Needless to say, this fundamental difference in perspective about ideas weaves, as merely one particular strand, through a vast historical tapestry of cultural and ideational differences whose full explication would be well beyond the bounds of this book. Yet we need to attend at least a little to this fundamental difference so that we are not inclined to impute to our writers views that could make no sense to them at all, because we have unintentionally read our understanding of ideas into what they were saying—the appearance of a shared language hiding from us quite different realities.

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For example: for Augustine, Anselm, or Aquinas the certainty of a truth about a particular object flows from the intelligibility of the object’s cause (i.e., God vs. a mutable sense object), and thus the living communicative power of that cause (in its intelligible form, i.e., as an idea) draws our thinking into a fulfilling participation in that truth. For most of our thinkers, then, the object of our thought brings our minds to life, actualizing our minds according to the idea (intelligible form) which “in-forms” them when the idea arouses them to thought. By contrast for thinkers in modernity, we arrive at certainty through arguments we make and the undefeated status of one set of our ideas over that of others; it is something that our minds, in contest with others, impose and declare about objects “out there” beyond our mind, not (as for our authors) a state of clarity that the object “out there” brings about within us as our minds think. Note the different direction of agency in this example: ideas as the intelligibility of reality actively drawing human knowers into truth, as compared with human knowers assigning meaning to things by means of the inner mental constructs we call our ideas. In fact for most of our authors, our mind is not an isolated, private realm separated from external reality at all; nor is the real truth of things unavailable to us (hidden beneath its embodied phenomenal appearance), such that only we, the thinking subject, may and must construct the meaning of things, constituting their significance according to the categories of own inner mental consciousness. For our authors, thinking is not secreted away from the world, but it is rather a kind of continual and communal collaborative interaction with the world of intelligible reality. Fergus Kerr explicates this perspective as it unfolds in the tradition of Aquinas: The Thomist wants to say that knowledge is the product of a collaboration between the object known and the subject who knows: the knower enables the thing known to become intelligible, thus to enter the domain of meaning, while the thing’s becoming intelligible activates the mind’s capacities. Knowing is a new way of being on the knower’s part; being known is a new way of being on the part of the object known. For Thomas, meaning is the mind’s perfection, the coming to fulfillment of the human being’s intellectual powers; simultaneously, it is the world’s intelligibility being realized.⁷

We tend to think of the world as reducible to matter, right down to its subatomic nature, but what if the most fundamental nature of all things is also conceivable (as our contemporary science suggests) as intelligible patterns of

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energy. Being aroused to recognize and understand this intelligible structure of reality, as Kerr proposes, is what fulfills us as thinkers, and the same activity—of the world arousing our mind—also allows the music of all creatures’ intelligibility to be heard and given voice: the ideas awaken minds to praise and respond to the intelligible beauty of all beings. Ideas, in this view, energize this subtle play between bodiliness as visible intelligibility and intelligibility as the living patterns that structure bodies. In other words, we should begin to notice that ideas (in this older tradition) not only have a primary agency out in the world (as opposed to only within our minds), but that they also need not be pitted over against matter and bodiliness. While it is a commonly held view that Platonist thought sees materiality as a mere shadow of the intelligible, and the body as a constraint upon the soul, the Christian thinkers we’ll be considering have been too well schooled in the meaning of the Incarnation to find such views fully adequate. For them, when humankind avoids treating the body and materiality idolatrously, it releases the divinely speaking intelligibility of the creatures—a release not from their materiality, but from the shut-down, sin-muffled, truth-distorting uncommunicativeness inflicted on creatures by human sinning. When creatures are seen and heard as the embodied thoughts of their Author, they are treated non-possessively and so are resonant again with the divine meaning, the ideas that they express. In his dialogue with his sister Macrina (324–379), Gregory of Nyssa (335–394) alludes to this shimmering intelligibility in which bodily creatures are the living confluence of the divine ideas that constitute them. It’s as if the body is the patient, unique physical expression of a flowing communication of divine meaning, of which the ideas are the universally communicative instruments. As Macrina explains to Gregory: Our discussion encounters a particularly great difficulty if we are not able to see how the visible arises from the invisible, the solid and hard from the intangible, the limited from the unlimited . . . . We say this much: that nothing of what appears in relation to the body is body in itself, not shape, nor color, nor weight, nor dimension, nor quantity, nor anything else of what is related to quality, but each of these is a principle (logos). The concurrence and union of these with one another becomes a body. So since the qualities, which together complete the body, are comprehended by mind and not by sense-perception, and the Divine is intellectual, why should not the Intelligible One be able to create the intelligible qualities which by their concurrence with one another have engendered the nature of our bodies?⁸

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In the views of Macrina and Gregory, we and all beings are embodied reflections of that continual divine speaking that causes us to exist; and because the divine speaker of all things is the Logos, truth itself, all beings are logikos, intelligible. This means that beings who have intelligence participate in the divinely-given intelligibility of the cosmos in a double way: they not only are themselves embodied echoes of the Word, but they share in the creation’s communal work of hearing and recognizing, praising and contemplating the intelligible reality that blazes forth in the existence of all things. Humans and angels don’t, in this view, peek out at the external world from within our minds, rather our thinking, our mindfulness, is really just the world’s own collaborative recognition of the divine intelligibility, the divine ideas, that constitute all reality. In fact, this contemplative recognition of the creatures’ meaning is an important aspect of the human vocation. In this section I’ve tried to show how we might expand what comes to mind whenever our authors speak of the divine ideas. For them, the ideas are native not to our minds but to God’s; they are living and active as the divine meaning resonant in all creaturely life. They arouse the intellect of angel and mortal to attend and revere the supernatural origin and destiny at the heart of things. Their truthfulness is visible in the beauty of bodiliness; in the material language of flesh and blood they communicate the divine meaning. And as humans contemplate this divine communication in all things, they fulfill their vocation as the world’s consciousness, coming into reverent awareness of its full intelligibility, bringing out and praising the universal divine truth in every unique expression, and so leading the whole creation into the divine conversation for which the universe was made.

The Material Significance of the Divine Ideas Tradition Now that I have offered some very preliminary observations about the divine ideas teaching, it will be useful to consider how its exponents understand both its material and formal significance—that is, the role it plays both in the substance of Christian theology and spirituality, and in the mode or manner in which Christianity seeks to understand what it believes. We begin with a landmark text from Augustine of Hippo (354–430). For centuries Christian thinkers commented upon this passage in their own development of the divine ideas tradition—which means they almost always begin with a particular concern of Augustine’s and most of the Platonist thinkers of his era, both Christian and non-Christian. This was a concern

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    

over where precisely to “locate” the ideas or forms. Plato’s Timaeus begins his “likely story” of the rational making of the world by suggesting that, as the world is intelligible and “the best of things that have become,” the maker of the world must have looked for a model not in that which is itself becoming and changing but upon that which is eternal and unchanging, and this is the “paradigm,” in likeness to which the world that we know exists.⁹ In commenting on this Platonist tradition, Augustine was understandably concerned to emphasize that God as the creator of all things was not dependent upon anything external to Godself, but rather that the rational basis or paradigm for every creature is entirely within God, as Augustine says, within the divine mind—which of course for him is the eternal Word. All things were founded by means of reason. Not that a human is based on the same reason as a horse; this would be an absurd notion. So, each one of these is created in accord with its own reason. Now, where would we think these reasons are, if not in the mind of the Creator? For He did not look to anything placed outside Himself as a model for the construction of what he created; to think that He did would be irreligious. Now, if these reasons for all things to be created, or already created, are contained in the divine mind, and if there can be nothing in the divine mind unless it be eternal and immutable, and if Plato called these primary reasons of things Ideas – then not only do Ideas exist but they are true because they are eternal and they endure immutably in this way; and it is by participation in these that whatever exists is produced, however its way of existing may be.¹⁰

In the post-Nicaea conflict over the equality of the Word or Son with the Father, Augustine would not have taken this position lightly; for Middle Platonist thinkers of almost every variety had already been content to locate the ideas within a divine intelligence, but for most of them this was an easy move because they conceived the divine mind or intelligence as subordinate or secondary to the divine One. So Augustine is clearly highlighting the significance of the ideas by intentionally locating them in the Word, given his unwavering intent to affirm the complete co-equality and co-eternity of the Word with the Father and the Spirit. It’s worth articulating the fundamental points the tradition draws from this important passage in Augustine. First, the created order is itself intelligible, for it expresses a meaningfulness available to rational minds; and this intelligibility is the reflection within time and space of an eternal rationality which is true and unvanquishable

     

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because it is the rationality of God’s own mind. Second, everything that exists does so because it participates in its exemplar form within God’s own mind; so there is not simply a bare divine ground at the heart of every creature but rather the very specific event of divine knowing and loving, and in this sense every creature in its exemplar has a kind of infinite mystical intimacy with God. Every creature is present at the heart of God and God is present at the heart of every creature. And of course Augustine would not fail to emphasize that God’s eternal Word or Mind is in fact nothing less than God. Thus the exemplar forms of all creatures are not a knowledge derived from creatures any more than from some external model, rather they simply are God’s own life. As Augustine explains, God does not know creatures because they exist, rather, creatures exist because God knows them; in other words, the eternal knowing of God that is the creative ground of all creatures is nothing other than God’s own knowing of Godself—it is God’s own essence in the act of self-knowing: This knowledge, therefore, is far unlike our knowledge. But the knowledge of God is also His wisdom, and His wisdom is His essence or substance itself. Because in the marvelous simplicity of that nature, it is not one thing to be wise, and another thing to be, but to be wise is the same thing as to be.¹¹

As we can see from these first brief examples, Augustine’s landmark Trinitarian location of the ideas means that the divine ideas are implicitly present at the intersection of multiple central Christian doctrines, including beliefs about creation, the being of God, the mystery of the Trinity, Christology, and theological epistemology. Although the divine ideas tradition often functioned implicitly, as a background assumption, I believe the tradition’s central location helps explain why it came to be so fruitful and suggestive of new insights for so many centuries and for so many different kinds of Christians. Yet my fundamental hypothesis is that the divine ideas tradition grew to such significance because it readily enabled Christian thinkers and believers to ponder the connection between our finite existence as creatures and the life of God; because of this it also enabled them to conceive of and to seek the inexhaustible self-giving of the Trinity within creation. We might call this the material significance of the divine ideas teaching, namely, its role in facilitating the coherent interaction of multiple Christian beliefs. As I will suggest throughout this book, this only was possible because Christian thinkers and spiritual teachers radically

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reinterpreted what might at first have seemed merely an accidental happenstance of Christianity’s historical development—namely the migration of Plato’s forms during the era now called Middle Platonism into the mind of God. As we have already begun to see, Christian theology and spirituality emphatically and self-consciously endorsed a Trinitarian location of the divine ideas. The consistent grounding of the ideas within the co-equal second person of the Trinity guaranteed their significance at the intersection of multiple Christian doctrines. Moreover, because Christians came to hold that the ideas were eternally present in the divine Word, and that the Word was incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, the theological significance of the divine ideas can never be fully understood apart from Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Let me now sketch this material significance of the tradition in a brief, synthetic, and heuristic way, offering a synoptic overview of how Christian thinkers have seen the divine ideas functioning theologically and spiritually— from their eternal generation in God to their embodiment in creation, and from their re-creation in Christ to the consummate contemplation of them by the saints and angels who share in God’s beatitude. The role of the ideas in the teaching of individual theologians and spiritual writers varies considerably, and I do not mean to homogenize their views in an artificial way; my goal in this brief section is merely to suggest how, over many centuries, the divine ideas tradition, broadly construed, is present and active (both explicitly and implicitly) in Christian belief, providing a rich mode of contemplating in integrity the life of the Trinity and the life of creatures in their calling towards consummation.

The Trinitarian Location of Exemplar Ideas As Christians came to understand the relation between Jesus and the one he called Father in the communion of their Spirit, within which they felt themselves invited, they reflected on what God must be like in Godself in order to account for this saving expression of infinite love within created time and space. It seemed to them, as John’s Gospel bears witness, that the one in whom they encountered the re-creation of their own lives must in some sense also be the one in whom and through whom God created all things. Thomas Aquinas offers a particularly clear articulation of this Christian conviction:

     

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The divine Persons, according to the nature of their processions, have a causality respecting the creation of things . . . . God is the cause of things by his intellect and will, just as the craftsman is cause of the things made by his craft. Now the craftsman works through the word conceived in his mind, and through the love of his will regarding some object. Hence also God the Father made the creature through his Word, which is his Son; and through his Love, which is the Holy Spirit.¹²

As with my analogy of an author of novels at the beginning of the chapter, Thomas suggests that God’s creative act flows from God’s own eternal act of self-understanding, the Word, in whom God conceives all the infinite reality of God’s own existence and simultaneously all the ways in which that infinite existence could be expressed in finite beings. And equally, Thomas emphasizes God’s infinite love and embrace of these finite possibilities, by which they are sustained in life and drawn towards their fulfillment. The implicit presence of the divine ideas in Thomas’ discussion is even more explicit in Augustine’s reflection on the same mystery of God’s infinite life as the ground of God’s creative art in the Word and sustaining delight in the Spirit. Where there is supreme and primordial life, such that it is not one thing to live and another to be, but being and living are the same; and where there is supreme and primordial understanding such that it is not one thing to understand and another to live, but understanding is identical with living, identical with all things, being as it were one perfect Word to which nothing is lacking, which is like the art of the almighty and wise God, full of all the living and unchanging ideas, which are all one in it [the Word], as it is one from the one [the Father] with whom it is one. In this art God knows all things that he has made through it, and so when times come and go, nothing comes and goes for God’s knowledge. For all these created things around us are not known by God because they have been made; it is rather, surely, that even changeable things have been made because they are unchangeably known by him. Then that inexpressible embrace, so to say, of the Father and the image is not without enjoyment, without charity, without happiness. So this love, delight, felicity, or blessedness . . . is the Holy Spirit in the triad, not begotten, but the sweetness of begetter and begotten pervading all creatures according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness, that they might all keep their right order and rest in their right places.¹³

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    

We should note several important features of this passage. Augustine emphasizes the vibrant simplicity of the divine life, wherein the full perfection of being and knowing and loving are all one reality. Thus this beautifully self-communicating divine reality, this Word, also turns to the continual imaging of the Father in the creation of what is not God; this is the divine “art,” we could say, “full of all the living and unchanging ideas,” in which “God knows all things that he has made through it.” Augustine also underscores that God’s ideas are not like ours, dependent on the transitory existence of things that happen to arouse us to thought; rather, just the reverse, it is God’s eternal knowing of all creatures in the divine ideas of the Word that causes the creatures to exist. Though the finite time spans of the creatures may come and go, “nothing comes and goes for God’s knowledge,” and so every creature enjoys not only an existence in time but an existence in God, for all their ideas are “one with” the Word “as it is one from the one with whom it is one.” Moreover we see that Augustine associates the ideas with the Spirit as well. For the creatures’ oneness with God in the Word means they share in “that inexpressible embrace of the Father and the image,” an embrace overflowing with such “love, delight, felicity, or blessedness” that its powerful joy pervades the earthly lives of the creatures, filling each to its capacity with the Spirit’s “vast generosity and fruitfulness.” I have emphasized this Trinitarian location of the divine ideas because in so many ways it is the crucial basis for the tradition’s significance. Perhaps I could put it this way: I think that the divine ideas tradition served in fact to “operationalize” Trinitarian doctrine, that is, to enable the deep structural meaning of Trinitarian thought to permeate and transfigure most other Christian beliefs. In overly simple terms, the divine ideas teaching allowed its exponents to show that whatever happens in the cosmos—whether it is the creation of the world or its ransoming—bears within it the finite reflection of its eternal ground in the infinite knowing and loving by which God is God.

Divine Ideas and the Intelligible Beauty of Creation This eternal Trinitarian knowing and loving of the creatures grounds, calls forth, and fulfills their existence in time. An evocative passage from one of Meister Eckhart’s sermons captures well Augustine’s sense of God’s delighted knowing and loving of Godself from which all creatures flow: “God savors Himself. In the savoring in which God savors Himself, therein

     

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He savors all creatures, not as creatures but creatures as God. In the savoring in which God savors Himself, therein He savors all things.”¹⁴ Accordingly we can see how the divine ideas teaching engenders a remarkable sense of divine luminosity, meaning and delight at the ground of each creature— flowing as it does from the divine wisdom, the eternal divine savoring of Godself which is also a savoring of all creatures as God’s ideas (Eckhart was likely punning for those who might recall a verbal echo of wisdom/sapientia in “savor”). Thus there is a mystical depth to creatures not simply in respect of their sheer existence, but also because of their intelligibility and cherishability as beings who come forth as the gift of God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself. For Aquinas, the Trinitarian ground of the creation in the divine ideas authorizes the theological exploration of creation’s beauty and the mystical significance of that intelligible beauty: “As a work of art manifests the art of the artisan, so the whole world is nothing else than a certain representation of the divine wisdom conceived within the mind of the Father.”¹⁵ It’s helpful to note here how the divine ideas teaching links together two key terms for Thomas. As with my earlier analogy between a great novelist and God, Thomas’ analogy helps us see that the “art” by which God creates the universe (the wonderful invention, abundant resource, and aesthetic judgment that are all manifest in the creation) is in fact God’s creative wisdom herself, “conceived within the mind of the Father.” In the divine ideas tradition, wisdom functions as a powerful theological concept, representing both the eternal, creative exemplar ideas in the mind of God, and also the transcendently beautiful mystery at the heart of all creation, namely, every creature’s rich symbolic depth, pointing by its very particularity to the radiant divine knowing and loving from which it flows. Thomas further emphasizes this deep expressive quality of the creatures as in some sense the very speech of God: “God himself is the eternal art from which creatures are produced like works of art. Therefore, in the same act, the Father is turned toward himself and to all creatures. Hence by uttering himself, he utters all creatures.”¹⁶ It’s easy to see how in such a conception the whole cosmos could be perceived as a divine speech event, resonant with meaning and resplendent with a beauty that calls for interpretation and wonder. Thomas highlights this sense in which the divine ideas teaching resources not only a sense of the divine depth at the heart of every creature, but also a sense of the creature as summoning the human mind towards a reverent engagement with every creature’s intelligible beauty. If the creatures are “word-full,” resonant with divine speech, then it is not surprising that they

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    

should arouse a response in the language and understanding of rational creatures. just as the likenesses of things in the Word cause existence in things, so also they cause knowledge in things – that is, insofar as they are received into intelligences, thus causing them to be able to know things. Hence, just as these likenesses are called life because they are principles of existing, so are they also called light because they are principles of knowing.¹⁷

For Thomas, the likenesses of the creatures-to-be living eternally in the Word are both life and light because they are nothing less than God’s own knowing of Godself—an eternal event of divine self-knowing that provides both the exemplar according to which each creature comes to exist in time and also the eternal reason according to which it may be known by other rational creatures in time. Thus for both angels and mortals to meet a fellow creature is to be drawn into an encounter with an illuminating expression of divine truth, the intelligible form—which actualizes the creature in its finite existence and actualizes the mind in knowing the creature. The divine ideas teaching undergirds the belief that all things reflect or echo within time and space the infinite wisdom and truth of God’s self-knowing. This pervasive sense that creation is therefore inherently representational and symbolic would be an important stimulus in the development of Christian mystical theology; for a mode of theology would be needed that seeks to understand the richness of divine meaning hiddenly present in all things. This view of creation reaches a particularly sophisticated articulation in the theology of Bonaventure (1221–1274). Because the Word is the perfect expression of the Father, and because the world is created through this same Word, the world not only expresses the Word who is its exemplar but also, in its inner structure, ceaselessly represents the Word’s own expressive or exemplary quality. In the words of a leading Bonaventure scholar: “The cosmic order, in its totality and in its parts, is a vast symbol in which God speaks his own mystery into that which is not himself. But the symbol is meant to be read and interpreted.”¹⁸ As we will see in the following chapters, this notion of God speaking the divine mystery at the heart of every creature carries momentous implications not only for Christianity’s understanding of nature and of the human self, but also for the possibility of creation’s mending: “The symbol is meant to be read and interpreted,” but what happens to creation when it is no longer perceived as a sign of the divine author of

     

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all things—when its human interpreters offer no other “reading” of creation than its exploitation?

Salvation in the Incarnate Word of all Things For centuries Christian teachers and spiritual guides pointed to the eternal Word of God, second person of the Trinity, as the one in whom and through whom all creatures have their being as archetypes in God and come to exist in time. This meant that Christ the incarnate Word is understood to be the manifestation in this world of the divine self-understanding, bearing within himself the truth of all creatures and, through the Paschal mystery, offering the creatures to the Father—liberated from sin through his death and recreated in their true reality by his resurrection. In this way, the divine ideas teaching confirmed the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus: the divine ideas help to explain Christ’s deep authority, his understanding of the truth of those whom he encountered, and why he is the one in whose service disciples were set free to become themselves. Few Christian teachers have expressed this Christological role of the divine ideas more fully than St. Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662). If, says Maximus, we turn our minds to the “intelligible model,” the Logos, “according to which things have been made,” we will “know that the one Logos is many logoi” because he held together in himself “the logoi before they came to be.”¹⁹ The Logos who “wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment” does so, says Maximus, in order that the full truth of the creatures may be renewed according to their logoi which the Logos incarnate bears within himself: Surely then, if someone is moved according to the Logos, he will come to be in God, in whom the logos of his being pre-exists as his beginning and his cause . . . . By drawing on wisdom and reason and by appropriate movement he lays hold of his proper beginning and cause. For there is no end toward which he can be moved, nor is he moved in any other way than toward his beginning, that is, he ascends to the Logos by whom he was created and in whom all things will ultimately be restored.²⁰

Moreover, says Maximus, it is only through the incarnate, embodied presence of the Logos that the creatures are able to learn the way they can be truly themselves again, set free to live according to the patterns of God’s own

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eternal knowing and loving of them. Commenting on “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), Maximus writes: “For whoever does not violate the logos of his own existence that pre-existed in God is in God through diligence; and he moves in God according to the logos of his wellbeing that pre-existed in God when he lives virtuously; and he lives in God according to the logos of his eternal being that pre-existed in God.”²¹ Salvation, in Maximus’ view, is not only a case of the Logos uniting humanity to himself in order to restore creation to harmony with its eternal logoi; the incarnate Word, by his obedience and moral goodness, also works within the creatures a progressive harmonization with their truth in God. Yet in the face of sin that divides and turns the creation against itself, denying its full truth in God, the embodied Word can only express this obedience to love in a way that offends the world. What the Logos in the flesh undergoes, however, works the liberation of the creatures’ truth. Writing very much in the tradition of Maximus, the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément (1921–2009) suggests that “the incarnate Logos frees the speechless tongue of creation . . . . Christ has become the direct divinehuman subject of the cosmic logoi. He confers on them their deepest meaning, their paschal nature, the power of the resurrection to work in them. He reveals their root in the abyss of the three-Personed God.”²² I think Clément is proposing here that as the incarnate Word, Christ bears the deep truth of the creatures, their eternal logoi or divine ideas, into the crucible of the Paschal mystery, liberating them from the cruel distortions that sin inflicts upon them. Why does Clément suggest that the resurrection reveals the roots of the creatures in the abyss of the Trinity? Because, I believe, drawing on the divine ideas tradition Clément understands that in the resurrection the Father vindicates the truth of the beloved Son and therefore also vindicates and makes manifest the deep, eternal, archetypal truth of all creatures in the divine knowing and loving from which they flow.

Contemplation and the Resurrection The divine ideas tradition, we could say, impels the human mind to wonder at the world around us and to inquire into its meaning as sign and symbol. “Every creature in the world,” Alan of Lille (1128–1202) famously observed, “is like a book and a picture and a mirror for us.”²³ And yet I have been arguing that the historical impact of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus profoundly reshapes Christianity’s understanding of the divine ideas

     

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as well as the human contemplative calling. Undoubtedly Christianity inherited a common late antique notion of the Mediterranean world, the notion of an untroubled philosophical ascent to transcendent knowledge. And it is certainly true that for devout Christian Platonists like Alan of Lille the contemplative calling seems to be a luminous ascent away from the murky materiality of this world: “In the fourth sphere shine the ideas, the exemplary forms of things which, glowing in the light of their purity, bring forth the bright day of eternal contemplation.”²⁴ Nonetheless, I believe it is fair to acknowledge a certain Paschal or even Eucharistic inflection in the Christian mystical theology of contemplation: the incarnate Word who draws the whole world to himself, in John’s phrase, includes all within his self-offering to the one he calls Father; and, I suggest, this Christological pattern draws the Christian understanding of contemplation towards its likeness. In seeking to hear and contemplate the speaking of the eternal Word as the ground of each creature’s being, the Christian contemplative might be said in effect to be holding the creature up into Christ’s own offering, thus seeking to unite the creature in its earthly travail with the full and restorative truth of its existence in the Word. Consider this important passage from Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1329): All creatures enter my understanding that they may become rational in me. I alone prepare all creatures for their return to God. Take care, all of you, what you do! Now I return to my inner and my outer man. I see the lilies in the field, their brightness, their color, and all their leaves. But I do not see their fragrance. Why? Because the fragrance is in me. But what I say is in me and I speak it forth from me. All creatures are savored by my outer man as creatures, like wine and bread and meat. But my inner man savors things not as creatures but as God’s gift. But my inmost man savors them not as God’s gift, but as eternity.²⁵

The playful delight so evident in Meister Eckhart’s sermon must not draw our attention away from the brilliant sequence of ideas in this passage. The most fundamental point is this: when thinking a creature, the mind is actualized by the creature’s intelligible form, its idea, and in doing this the mind prepares the creature’s “return to God” by linking its finite existence in time with its eternal existence (as intelligible form) in the divine Mind or Word. Moreover in this very same act the human mind realizes the creature’s true identity as a gift of God, to be savored in all its eternal goodness.

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    

What is especially notable here is Eckhart’s manner of drawing his listeners into the experience: by contrasting the external appearance of lilies with the interior enjoyment of their fragrance, Eckhart prepares his listeners to consider the mysterious relationship between the external expression of a word as speech and the internal word (and eternal Word) from which all things flow and by which they are known. We could say that in a sense Eckhart is teaching his hearers how to read or better hear the world as the expression of divine speech flowing eternally from within the divine mind. And so Eckhart conducts his listeners from the outer finite existence of things to their intelligible significance within the human understanding— and there he surprises his hearers by revealing that their flowing forth as intelligible forms within the mind is the mirror or echo of their infinite flowing forth from the divine generosity, the goodness of eternity. We can draw an illuminating analogy between Eckhart’s teaching and the approach taken by Bonaventure to this same question of how the human contemplative calling helps to reunite the creatures with their divine truth. For Bonaventure, the profoundly mystical or symbolic dimension of the creatures is disclosed precisely through the incarnate Word, who restores the hidden exemplarity within the created order by assuming it into union with himself. Bonaventure describes his master Francis as one who, through his fidelity to the incarnate Word, is able to contemplate the mystical meaning within the great creation-symbol: Aroused by all things to the love of God, he rejoiced in all the works of the Lord’s hands and from these joy-producing manifestations he rose to their life-giving principle and cause. In beautiful things he saw Beauty itself and through his vestiges imprinted on creation he followed his Beloved everywhere, making all things a ladder by which he could climb up and embrace Him who is utterly desirable. With a feeling of unprecedented devotion he savoured in each and every creature—as in so many streams—that Goodness which is their fountain source.²⁶

For Bonaventure, the poverty of Francis and his profound interior freedom are what make it possible for him to recognize and respond in a nonpossessive way to the beauty of the creatures, and so avoid silencing within them the mystical expressivity of the Word. It is not coincidental that Francis, in receiving the marks of Christ’s passion, exemplifies the reorientation of humanity’s contemplative calling within Christianity: the acceptance by the incarnate Word of the world’s distortion of his truth and his

     

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willing relinquishment of that untruth in death means that the contemplative journey within Christianity can never leave embodiment behind. As Bonaventure shows us in Francis, a Christologically-shaped contemplation requires detachment from all possessive and distorting grasping of the creatures; but their bodiliness must be included in order that they may be offered freely and openly to the true meaning given to them by the Father in response to Christ’s own prayer and self-offering. As we have seen already, the Trinitarian location of the ideas leads to a profoundly Christological revolution in the ideas’ significance. The eternal truth of each creature, perfectly understood and cherished in its Author, is not only the likeness by which the creature is formed and known in time; even more than that, in the dying and rising of Christ, the idea of each creature is also its unvanquishable reality by which it may be restored and vindicated against whatever lies, prejudices, or demeaning cruelties may seek to dominate it in this world. In the Paschal mystery Christ holds the truth of every creature open towards God’s knowing of it and God’s re-creation of it in the resurrection. For whatever the world may say about a creature, that will never be the last word about it; as Thomas observes, there is another Word who bears each creature’s truth: “Since God by understanding himself understands all other things . . . The Word conceived in God by his understanding of himself must also be the Word of all things.”²⁷ Perhaps it would be useful to pause here for a moment and consider the full significance of Thomas’ view that the Word represents the real meaning and truth of each creature; if in their historical existence, creatures were to suffer the brokenness of this world such that their very truth and life were put in peril, might the incarnate presence of their authoring Word raise creatures to himself and so restore them to their true life? Consider Thomas’ account of this constitutive relationship between God’s knowing of the creatures in the Word and their existence in time: Because the likeness of a creature existing within the Word in some way produces the creature and moves it as it exists in its own nature, the creature, in a sense, moves itself, and brings itself into being; that is, in view of the fact that it is brought into being, and is moved by its likeness existing in the Word. Thus the likeness of a creature in the Word is, in a certain sense, the very life of the creature itself.²⁸

Accordingly, we might say that in the resurrection the Father acknowledges and embraces the creatures in the incarnate Word—accepting them as in truth

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    

those who live in the Word and thus re-creating them by restoring them to unity with their very life as it has been eternally known and loved in God. In light of all this we might ask, how would exponents of the divine ideas tradition be inclined to interpret this famous passage from Colossians, for example? So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1–4, NRSV)

The Gospels portray this world as denying and distorting the truth of Christ’s identity; and the Gospels also consistently show Jesus—at his baptism, transfiguration, and resurrection—as vindicated by the Father and declared to be the true expression of the Father’s meaning (“seated at the right hand of God”). I’m arguing, then, that for the divine ideas tradition the addressees of the Letter to the Colossians have been tested and their identity as the world constitutes it has been put to death in Christ, and so their true life is indeed hid in Christ and awaiting its full vindication in his appearing, for the imperishable and restorative truth of every creature is hid in Christ the Word incarnate. The divine ideas tradition helps to explain how the death and resurrection of Christ could mean what Colossians suggests (and indeed expands this to include the whole creation), namely that the life of creatures is truly present within the Word incarnate and that the destiny of creatures is thus fundamentally constituted by the Father’s vindication of the Word, affirming and embracing the true life of all creatures in Christ’s resurrection. To return to the language of Colossians: you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all. (Colossians 3:9–11, NRSV)

United with Christ the Word incarnate, the identity of creatures as dominated and constructed by culture and oppression is now restored, for it is renewed by the truth of all creatures in Christ.

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I hope that this brief survey of the material implications of the divine ideas teaching across the range of Christian beliefs will be a helpful guide for the chapters ahead. But this capacity of the divine ideas to facilitate Christian beliefs derives, I believe, from the way in which the ideas shape the mode of Christian reflection.

The Formal Significance of the Divine Ideas Tradition So far I have proposed that the material significance of the divine ideas flows from their location in the eternal Word of God—the one “in whom and through whom all things were made” (John 1:3) and who becomes incarnate, Christians believe, to bring about the re-creation of all things. This means that Christians came to conceive not only of an eternal speaking of all creatures in the Word of God but also equally of a temporal speaking of the Word in all creatures. The material significance of the divine ideas tradition has always, I believe, kindled within Christian theology and spirituality a desire to find God in all things, to seek a deeper understanding of the divine speaking in everything, from created beings to the Scriptures to the act of worship itself. And this points us to the formal significance of the divine ideas, that is, to the particular way in which that tradition tended to open doctrine to prayer, theology to spirituality. Let me try to explain why I think this formal significance of the divine ideas tradition lies in its capacity to imbue theology with a contemplative momentum. In his theology of faith, St. Thomas Aquinas observes that the act of believers’ faith does not reach its goal in the language of the church’s teachings but in the reality to which the teachings point.²⁹ In this sense, of course, every Christian doctrine could be seen as generating a contemplative trajectory, for God alone could bring believers to that fullness of understanding to which the language of doctrine is meant to direct us. We might say that to ponder any Christian belief is at least to risk the possibility that the divine teacher, whose self-disclosure is the ground of all belief, would come to deepen and consummate the believer’s search for understanding. Hence the famous observation of Evagrius (345–399) that the true theologian is the one who prays, and the one who prays is a true theologian³⁰—on the assumption that the truest form of theology is nothing less than being drawn by the Holy Spirit into God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself. So why would the divine ideas teaching, perhaps more than some other aspects of Christian doctrine, be particularly apt to open theology to prayer?

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Simply put, because the divine ideas teaching not only articulates how God’s eternal activity of knowing is the ground of every creature’s existence, but also the ground of every rational creature’s ability to know. For the divine ideas tradition, every creaturely act of knowing includes some form of participation in the life of God as eternally knowing and loving all that is. In his Commentary on the Song of Songs, the great Alexandrian Christian thinker Origen (c.184–253) emphasized the instructive manner in which God brought all of visible creation into existence so as to lead the mind of the rational creatures towards the invisible archetypes from which all the visible creatures flow and because of which they are intelligible. “All things visible,” says Origen, “have some invisible likeness and pattern,” but these are impossible for us mortals to know in our present state, and so God draws us towards the contemplation of them: I think that he who made all things in wisdom so created all the species of visible things upon earth, that he placed in them some teaching and knowledge of things invisible and heavenly, whereby the human mind might mount to spiritual understanding and seek the grounds of things in heaven.³¹

Note that for Origen God creates the beautiful array of the cosmos and imbues it with the compelling and attractive “knowledge of things invisible and heavenly” in order that the human mind would be drawn towards “spiritual understanding” precisely by coming to be informed by “the grounds of things in heaven,” that is, their intelligible archetypes in the mind of God. To put this another way, God’s creative wisdom presents rational creatures with an intelligible universe whose very intelligibility is a compelling reflection within the human mind of the eternal light of God’s own self-knowing, which includes God’s knowing of all creatures. For much of the history of Christian thought this notion was so attractive that it often led to wondering reverence among thinkers such as Augustine or Aquinas, as they pondered, for example, the special privilege of the angels who even now behold the truths of all creatures as they exist in the mind of God. Thomas remarks regarding the angels that “by beholding the Word, they know not merely the being of things as existing in the Word, but the being as possessed by the things themselves; as God by contemplating Himself sees that being which things have in their own nature.”³² We particularly want to note here Thomas’ observation: the intelligible forms of creatures that the angels behold in the eternal Word are the means by

     

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which they know the full, embodied, historical existence of creatures in the world. At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I’m suggesting, then, that insofar as the divine ideas tradition remained a background presupposition for much of Christian theology, it will have inclined Christians to ponder the promise that their deepest understanding of anything would (in some way) always include the mysterious gift of sharing in God’s own knowing of all things. The general consensus among Christians has been that, while in this mortal life, humans cannot (as angels can) contemplate directly the divine ideas of creatures existing eternally in the Word. And yet the divine ideas do have a role to play in human understanding. As Aquinas explains, “Augustine, for the ideas defended by Plato, substituted the types of all creatures existing in the divine mind, according to which types all things are made in themselves, and are known to the human soul.”³³ As Thomas goes on to say, while human beings cannot see the divine ideas or types directly, for this would after all be to see the divine essence itself, it is at least in part by means of the divine ideas that human beings are able to know the truth of creatures. How can this be? For Thomas, there are two aspects to every act of human understanding: there is the impression of an object delivered by our senses to our mind, and there is the power of our mind—which Thomas calls the “intellectual light itself which is in us”—to bring forth from this sense impression the idea or intelligible form of the thing it considers, and so to know the thing itself. But it is crucial to see how Thomas identifies the source of this intellectual light or power of the mind; for in his view, the power of God’s eternal knowing of the truth of all things in the Word (according to their types or divine ideas) is the very light of Truth itself, which illuminates every creaturely act of understanding: “The human soul knows all things in the eternal types . . . . For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types.”³⁴ Remarkably, Thomas is saying that this power or light of our minds, by which we are able to know the truth of things, is in fact nothing less than God giving us a share in God’s power to see that truth (“the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types”). It is God granting us a likeness, a participation in that power or light, allowing us to bring forth from our senses the idea of the creature that coheres with the same idea in the divine mind—for that is its truth: as Thomas observes, “the likeness of things existing in the Word are the measures of the truth of all things, because a thing is said to be true insofar as it imitates that upon which it was modeled,

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and this archetype exists in the Word.”³⁵ So every time humankind seeks to know and contemplate the truth of things, we open finite reality to an echo, a mystical mediation, of God’s knowing of the truth of all things in the Word. In such moments it would only be natural if these acts of human thought, sometimes at least, blossomed into prayer. We will consider this contemplative momentum instilled by the divine ideas into Christian theology more fully in Chapters 4 and 5.

Notes 1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.37.2 ad. 3, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1911; reprint ed. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). Unless otherwise noted, all references to the ST will be from this edition. 2. John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 130. 3. I remain deeply indebted to Jaroslav Pelikan, Hans Frei, and Louis Dupré who first helped me understand the shift in Western thought that emerged in the late medieval and early modern eras. Crucial for the section that follows (indeed the book as a whole) is a seminal work by Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), especially chapters 1–3. 4. Gerd Van Riel, “Introduction,” in Platonic Ideas and Concept Formation in Ancient and Medieval Thought, ed. Gerd Van Riel and Caroline Macé (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), 1. 5. Among many excellent accounts, see Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” chap. 1 in his Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and also Robert M. Berchman, “The Language of Metaphysics Ancient and Modern,” in Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern, ed. Kevin Corrigan and John D. Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 175–190. 6. Anthony Kenny, “Descartes on Ideas,” in Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Willis Doney (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 227. 7. Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 30. 8. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 99 (PG 46, 124B–D). 9. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 27d–29d. 10. Augustine of Hippo, Eighty-three Different Questions, q.46.2, trans. Vernon J. Bourke in The Essential Augustine, ed. Vernon J. Bourke (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1974), 63.

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11. Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate XV.13, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 485. 12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.45.6. 13. Augustine, The Trinity, VI.11, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), 213. 14. Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 56,” in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009), 293. 15. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St John, trans. James A. Weisheipl and Fabian Richard Larcher (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1980), 75. 16. Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 4.4, sed contra three, trans. Robert W. Mulligan S. J. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1954), 185. 17. Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 4.8, Reply 4. 18. Zachary Hayes, “Incarnation and Creation in Theology of St. Bonaventure,” in Studies Honoring Ignatius Charles Brady Friar Minor, ed. Romano Stephen Almagno, OFM, and Conrad L. Harkins, OFM (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1976), 309–330 (316). 19. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7.11 in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 54–55. 20. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7.11, pp. 60, 56. 21. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7.11, p. 59. 22. Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, trans. Theodore Berkeley and Jeremy Hummerstone (New York: New City Press, 1995), 216. 23. Alan of Lille, De Incarnatione Christi (PL 210.579B), quoted in G. R. Evans, Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 151. 24. Alan of Lille, “Sermon on the Intelligible Sphere,” paragraph 14 in Literary Works, trans. and ed. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2013), 9. 25. Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 56,” p. 293. 26. Bonaventure, “The Life of St. Francis,” 9.1, in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins, Classics of Western Spirituality Series (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 262–263. 27. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV.13.6, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1957/1975), 94. 28. Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 4.8, Reply, p. 199. 29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae.1, 2 ad 2. 30. Ponticus Evagrius, “Chapters on Prayer,” in The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981), ¶60.

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31. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs: Commentary and Homily, Book 3.12, trans. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers Series (New York: Newman Press, 1956), 220. 32. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia.58.7. 33. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.84.5 (my emphasis). 34. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.84.5. 35. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate 4.6, sed contra 3, p. 194.

2 The Intelligible Beauty of Creation In an era of dangerously accelerating environmental crisis, the Christian theology of creation can and must offer as illuminating and accurate a mode of reflection on our world as possible. This chapter follows the trail of the divine ideas tradition to uncover and re-present those elements in the theology of creation that highlight the immeasurable goodness of all beings. It has sometimes been suggested that Christianity, having taught that the cosmos is not divine itself, nor filled with deities, has provided unqualified license to humanity’s examination of nature, and so is responsible for the rise of modern science but also for the exploitation of the natural world; both of these are seen as deriving from Christianity’s strict division between the Creator and a world called into existence out of nothing—and from the subjection of the natural world to human dominion. My argument in this chapter indirectly responds to these perspectives and considers the view that Christianity has dimmed the light of divine presence in nature and diminished human reverence and care for our planet. On the contrary, I suggest, there are powerful and recoverable elements in Christian belief that emphasize the luminously meaningful goodness of creation, and revere its order and beauty as a sign of divinely authoring truth. Perhaps we can most easily catch a glimpse of this tradition through the eyes of one who pondered its vanishing. As her family attempted to find a way out of Vichy-France, the young Jewish intellectual Simone Weil was struggling to make sense of the grotesque disjunction between the true beauty of the world and the brutalizing glamour of the collaborationist propaganda and that of its powerful German sponsor. In ancient times the love of the beauty of the world had a very important place in men’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with a marvelous poetry . . . . Today one might think that the white races had almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the world, and that they had taken upon them the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade and their religion.¹

The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology. Mark A. McIntosh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Mark A. McIntosh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.003.0003

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As Weil analyzed the enigma, she viewed the fatal divorce between authentic beauty and truthfulness as a symptom of humanity’s longing for power and possession. “The love of power amounts to a desire to establish order among the men and things around oneself . . . the question is one of forcing a certain circle into a pattern suggestive of universal beauty.”² The human mind, warping its perceptions to accord with its desires, first begins to create an illusory world to suit itself and then increasingly insists on distorting reality to fit—eventually denying its very existence. Indeed, at the present moment one could hardly think of a more painful example of humanity’s refusal to hear the truth that nature is speaking than the devastating denial of climate change. Weil’s point is that natural beauty becomes dangerously unable to bear witness to truth because the human appetite for power leads us to instrumentalize nature, commodifying the beauty originally learned and derived from nature into an object used for some purpose (perhaps to manipulate others), rather than allowing beauty to draw human beings towards a much more universal good. Perhaps we could even say that, for Weil, humanity’s attitude towards the created order has led to its brutal misuse, stifling its capacity to speak of a reality that exceeds the grasp of human intent. But as Weil saw, the reduction and splintering of nature’s meaning when it is held within the vise of human possessive perception effectively creates a human simulacrum of nature that, ironically, traps human perception within its illusory world and degrades beauty’s intrinsic unity with truth and goodness. In fact, Weil contrasts this threatened loss of the created order’s ability to speak truth by means of its beauty with what she sees as lingering authentic quests for beauty in art and in science: the object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the universe, the Wisdom of which we are the brothers, the presence of Christ, expressed through the matter which constitutes the world. We reconstruct for ourselves the order of the world in an image, starting from limited, countable, and strictly defined data. . . . . Thus in an image, an image of which the very existence hangs upon an act of our attention, we can contemplate the necessity which is the substance of the universe.³

To appreciate the power of Weil’s insight, we must note the careful intertwining of three crucial strands in her observation. First, the only human perspective capable of apprehending the deep truth in the ordering beauty or wisdom of the universe is a human stance of attention, of contemplative and

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therefore non-possessive awareness. Secondly, one who attends or waits patiently upon nature begins to perceive the presence of divine ordering, of Christ or Wisdom herself—and most wonderfully this presence is mediated through the very fundamental necessities of matter, of embodied existence in all its angular realities. And thirdly, it is the very act of humanity’s patient attention, attempting to model the implicit structures of nature in scientific formulae or artistic expression, that awakens humanity to our own deep kinship as sisters and brothers of all the other creatures, who also bodily communicate the singular wisdom whose beauty radiates through all. Weil draws our attention to the mysterious way in which a reverent human perception of nature opens one to a unifying experience of divine communication in the created order. In this she startlingly refreshes an important strand in the Christian tradition articulated, for example, by Augustine: There are not many wisdoms, but only one. And in this Wisdom there is an infinite and inexhaustible treasury of intelligible realities containing all the invisible and unchangeable ideas [rationes] of all the visible and changeable existences which were made by this Wisdom. For, God has made nothing unknowingly.⁴

It’s crucial to notice that Augustine like Weil regards human perception as vitiated, constricted by idolatrous desire that reduces consciousness of the full gift of reality to the narrow grasp of one’s own possessiveness. The liberated consciousness that both Augustine and Weil commend releases one to perceive not this or that aspect of intelligibility in the creation but rather the full plenitude of intelligible beauty or Wisdom in the universe as a whole—that is, not parceled out into what belongs to one being or another but an infinite generosity, radiantly embodied in the full diversity of all creatures. And as we have seen already in the previous chapter, it is the divine ideas that, for Augustine, constitute Wisdom’s treasury and guarantee the truth and beauty of the visible creation.

Wisdom the Mystical Light of Creation Now I want to portray some crucial ways in which the divine ideas tradition has served to sustain “an intelligible bond between the incomprehensible

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God and our own world.”⁵ My fundamental claim will be that the divine ideas tradition has helped nourish a strand of reverence and concern for the creation as a sacramental sign of divine goodness; and that it was able to do so precisely by regarding the “knowableness” or intelligibility of nature (to human thought) as a beautiful expression of God’s inexhaustible goodness and truth, an expression worthy of human joy, wonder, and care. I’m suggesting, then, that the world of the divine ideas, named in the tradition as Wisdom, is the hidden or mystical ground of creation’s intelligibility and the basis for creation’s compelling power to awaken human contemplation. Indeed for many medieval thinkers, as Umberto Eco notes, “there is an aesthetic element when the intellect freely contemplates the wonder and beauty of earthbound form” and this aesthetic or contemplative moment calls forth a very special capacity in the human person, “discerning in the concrete object an ontological reflection of, and participation in, the being and power of God.”⁶ This capacity of the human mind to discern the creation’s reflection of and participation in God stems, as we saw in Chapter 1, from the two fundamental aspects of the divine ideas—or rather, at least, the fundamental aspects of human thinking about the divine ideas: (a) the eternal reasons by which God knows the truth of all creatures, and also (b) the exemplar forms according to which the creatures exist in time and space (by the gift of existence that God continually bestows at the heart of every being). Both these aspects of the ideas are simply different sides of one reality: God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself, and therein also God’s knowing and loving of all the ways in which finite beings might share in the gift of God’s inexhaustible life. In other words, the ideas in their aspect as the eternal reasons by which all things are known, and the ideas in their aspect as the eternal exemplars or archetypes by which all things are created—in both these aspects the ideas are really in fact God’s own essence, that is, God’s own existence. Why is this so important? Because the fact that the ideas are in truth God’s own existence is what authorizes the mystical intimacy between all creatures and their Creator; it is why the ideas can be said to reflect divine grace and beauty as they are expressed in created finite beings, and as they awaken human or angelic minds to the truth of all beings through each being’s intelligible form. Thomas Aquinas displays with particular clarity both these aspects— ideas as the reasons by which things are understood, and ideas as the exemplars by which they are created—held together with the all-important

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fact of their identity as God’s own existence. For in God, says Thomas, the mind and that which the mind understands “are one and the same”; everything that God has or wills or knows, Christians believe, simply is God: Hence whatever is in God as understood is the very living or life of God. Now, wherefore, since all things that have been made by God are in Him as things understood, it follows that all things in Him are the divine life itself.⁷

The eternal reasons by which God understands everything that exists “are the divine life itself” says Thomas. Thus the intelligible forms that cause all creatures to be and also actualize every mind that knows the creatures are the living and radiant reflections within time and space of God’s own eternal reasons, God’s own life. I’m suggesting, then, that the embodied form of the creatures, by its very intelligibility to rational created minds, represents a hidden or mystical presence of God, drawing the creation towards communion. Moreover, the divine ideas tradition also highlights the beautiful variety and diversity of creation, the rich particularity of all its existing forms, as bearing within itself a mystical exemplarity—the finite sign and seal of infinite wisdom. As Thomas observes, everything that nature produces receives particular form and this instantiation of intelligible form flows directly from “the divine wisdom as its first principle”: for divine wisdom devised the order of the universe, which order consists in the variety of things. And therefore we must say that in the divine wisdom are the types of all things, which types we have called ideas—i.e. exemplar forms existing in the divine mind. And these ideas, though multiplied by their relations to things, in reality are not apart from the divine essence, according as the likeness to that essence can be shared diversely by different things. In this manner therefore God Himself is the first exemplar of all things.⁸

It’s helpful to recall that for Thomas as for the Christian tradition generally, the causal divine exemplarity, the eternal Wisdom in likeness to which each creature exists in its particularity, is not some fading effect of a long ago cause, but the continuous giving of the creature’s existence as precisely what it is in every moment that it exists. Every creature by virtue of its embodied and perceptible reality luminously expresses God who “is the first exemplar of all things,” in Thomas’ words.

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While Thomas highlights the divine ideas impressed within nature, the great Renaissance era exponent of the divine ideas teaching Marsilio Ficino sees the divine goodness as radiantly expressed within multiple levels of reality: the divine ideas as instantiating a supernal beauty as they cascade through a series of different orders of existence. In Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium (Speech II, Ch. 5), he illustrates how the divine beauty shines through all things and is loved in all things. Ficino explains how God as goodness itself permeates the universe as beauty, in other words as an attractive and compelling power that allows participation in the primal goodness of God through the unfolding presence of the ideas: Beauty is a certain act or ray from [God] penetrating through all things: first into the Angelic Mind, second into the Soul of the whole, and the other souls, third into Nature, fourth into the Matter of bodies. It adorns the Mind with the order of the Ideas. It fills the Soul with the series of the Reasons. It supports Nature with the Seeds. It ornaments Matter with the Forms. But just as a single ray of the sun lights up four bodies, fire, air, water, and earth, so a single ray of God illuminates the Mind, the Soul, Nature, and Matter. And just as anyone who sees the light in these four elements is looking at a ray of the sun itself and, through that ray is turned to looking at the supreme light of the sun, so anyone who looks at and loves the beauty in those four, Mind, Soul, Nature, and Body, is looking at and loving the splendor of God in them, and, through this splendor, God himself.⁹

It is perhaps helpful to notice the different ways in which the divine ideas teaching affords Aquinas and Ficino opportunities to ponder the hidden presence of God at the heart of creation. For Thomas God is present “innermostly” in every being as the continuously giving ground of each creature’s existence;¹⁰ but as we saw just above, the divine ideas teaching also allows Thomas to highlight the divine exemplarity present within every creature as the unquenchable light of its intelligible form, its embodied communication of divine meaning. Ficino wants to extend what he reads in Thomas by pointing to a series of analogues or cognate versions of the ideas (ideas, reasons, seeds, forms) suitable for each domain of the created order; he does this to emphasize not only that this divine intelligibility is present in every dimension of creation—from the angelic intelligence or mind to the concrete reality of embodied matter—but also that the divine

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intelligibility, the reflection of the divine ideas, is present precisely as supremely self-communicating form: beauty as the reflection of divine truth expressed in every creature, the light of God arousing wonder and love throughout creation. We can begin to see more fully how the divine ideas came to support this perspective by considering texts from two landmark exponents, Origen and Augustine. In Peri Archon, we find Origen teaching about the noetic significance and intelligibility of creation, and thus also the human calling to behold and understand the truth of the creatures. He notes that the eternally begotten Word of God is the divine Wisdom in whom “there was implicit every capacity and form of the creation that was to be . . . . she [Wisdom] fashions beforehand and contains within herself the species and causes of the entire creation.”¹¹ For Origen, this divine Wisdom is not only the Word by which the Father eternally speaks the divine life and truth, but is the crucially revealing Word who unveils the truth of all creatures: For wisdom opens to all other beings, that is, to the whole creation, the meaning of the mysteries and secrets which are contained within the wisdom of God, and so she is called the Word, because she is as it were an interpreter of the mind’s secrets . . . . This Son, then, is also the truth and the life of all things that exist; and rightly so. For the things that were made, how could they live, except by the gift of life? Or the things that exist, how could they really and truly exist, unless they were derived from the truth?¹²

In this passage, Origen very explicitly grounds the veracity and intelligibility of the universe in the divine truth. He points to an intrinsic generosity and bounty in that divine wisdom; for not only does Wisdom form the intelligible structure of all things, but she seeks to open to all other beings “the meaning of the mysteries and secrets which are contained within the wisdom of God.” Wisdom is a Word who can become the “interpreter of the mind’s secrets.” Origen hints here at the communal and indeed communion-like nature of the event of knowing; for the understanding of all things is likened to an opening of what is hidden and an interpretive exegesis, both of which for Origen have their true locus in the church’s life of catechesis and worship. The “mind’s secrets” that Wisdom interprets are discovered as dwelling first with God but reflected in the creatures and recognized in gratitude by finite minds who are open to Wisdom’s teaching. Origen had developed this theme earlier in his commentary on John’s Gospel. In this work, the great exegete not only ponders the gospel in its

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depths (the first six books of the commentary still only bring Origen to John 1.29), but manages to co-opt the gnostic proclivities of his contemporary Heracleon’s rival exegesis of John by showing that the Word not only contains all things but does truly become fully embodied humanly, precisely so as to accomplish the resurrection of all things in himself. Not surprisingly, then, given this background, Origen emphasizes the noetic significance and role of Christ in both his creative and re-creative activity. As he prepares to discuss John 1.1, in what sense the Word was “in the beginning,” Origen characteristically points to the end of all things as the crucial clue to their origins. “For at that time,” he writes, those who have come to God because of the Word which is with him will have the contemplation of God as their only activity, that having been accurately formed in the knowledge of the Father, they may all thus become a son, since now the Son alone has known the Father.¹³

Clearly the incarnate Word lives within our world the true contemplative vision of the Father, that is, the vision that is only possible in filial relation to the Father; and in order for the fallen creatures to catch some transforming glimpse of this, the Word must become truly flesh. From this high point of contemplative vision, Origen underscores the many biblical categories of creaturely fallenness and need, showing how Christ becomes fully and truly present in each of these conditions in order to reach those who suffer there: the Savior, he writes, “becomes many things, or perhaps even all these things, as the whole creation which can be made free needs him.”¹⁴ For the great Alexandrian, the Word made flesh bears within himself the creative (and thus re-creative) truths that illuminate the reality of every creature; indeed for Origen as for Thomas, it is precisely because the Word so perfectly expresses all that the Father is that the Word also expresses all that is known in the eternal divine contemplation. Thus Origen, treating the crucial phrase in John 1.3–4, “what came to be in him was life,” forthrightly announces: “Life, therefore, came to be in the Word. And neither is the Word other than the Christ, God the Word, the one with the Father,” and he asks immediately, can we not take this as the “beginning” of all things, “so that all things came to be in accordance with the wisdom and plans of the system of thoughts in the Word.” For I think that just as a house and a ship are built or devised according to the plans of the architect, the house and the ship having as their beginning

    

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the plans and thoughts in the craftsman, so all things have come to be according to the thoughts of what will be, which were prefigured by God in wisdom, “For he made all things in wisdom.” And we must say that after God had created living wisdom, if I may put it this way, from the models in her he entrusted to her [to present] to the things which exist and to matter [both] their conformation and forms.¹⁵

Clearly Origen is keen to continue the contemplative-creative interplay we’ve been noting: that is, Wisdom is the living contemplation of the truths of all things, and from this vision, which is after all a theoria of God, in God, the forming of the creatures (and, in redemption, their re-forming) can take place. The divine ideas tradition as it develops in Christian thought thus nurtures the sense that creation is not only intelligible, and its embodied forms beautiful in a way that draws the human knower towards the contemplation of their source—more than that, I believe, exponents of the divine ideas teaching encourage their readers to regard the deepest acts of human understanding as communion-like events. Bonaventure gestures towards this communion among rational minds, embodied creaturely beings, and the eternal Wisdom or Art of God wherein dwell the divine ideas; for everything, says Bonaventure, enjoys a threefold existence: “in matter, in the understanding, and in the Eternal Art.”¹⁶ In this view, then, the eternal Wisdom in whom dwell the archetypal reasons of every creature continually speaks their truth at the heart of each embodied creature, and the human mind is awakened by this intelligible form and so is moved towards the act of understanding. Thus the intelligible beauty of creation is the crucial link in a mystical conversation made possible by the coherence among three forms of Wisdom’s self-communication: the eternal ideas in God’s mind, their embodiment in all creatures, and their luminous intelligibility awakening the mind to understanding. We can explore this logic from another angle by considering Augustine’s treatment of the very same verse, John 1.3–4, that we just saw Origen at work upon. In his homilies on John’s Gospel, Augustine explains the basic point as follows: A carpenter makes a chest. First he has the chest in his creative knowledge (in arte). For if he did not have it in creative knowledge, from what source could he produce it in constructing it? But the chest exists in his creative knowledge in such a way that it is not the very same chest which is seen by

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     the eyes. In his creative knowledge it exists invisibly; in the product it will exist visibly. Look now, it has come to exist in the product. Does it cease to exist in [the carpenter’s] creative knowledge? Both the one came into existence in the product and at the same time the other which exists in his creative knowledge remains.¹⁷

Augustine wants his hearers to realize that while the theoretical box, existing in the design-idea of the artisan, is not only distinct from the wooden box on the shelf, but that this creative design within the mind of the artisan is living in three crucial senses. First of course this idea is living because it is nothing less than the artisan’s own life in the act of thinking: “The chest in the product is not life; the chest in the creative knowledge is life. For the soul of the craftsman, in which exist all these things before they are produced, has life” (I.17, p. 57). By analogy, the far more living and indeed eternal Wisdom of God becomes the author of life for all creatures as well: Because the wisdom of God, through which all things were made, contains all things in accordance with his creative knowledge (secundum artem continet omnia) before he constructs all things, it follows that whatever things are made through this creative knowledge are not immediately life; but whatever has been made is life in him. You see the earth; there exists an earth in his creative knowledge. You see the sky; there exists a sky in his creative knowledge. You see the sun and the moon; these, too, exist in his creative knowledge. But externally they are bodies; in his creative knowledge they are life. (I.17, p. 57)

So, this is the second sense of life: according to the living and eternal Wisdom all things are made in finite form, and thus their mundane existence is continually sustained as an expression of their living, authoring truth in the divine Art. The beauty and wonder of earth, sky, sun, and moon captivate our minds precisely because they express in embodied reality the creative Wisdom that human minds perceive and long to understand. And because of that, says Augustine, there is life in a third sense, namely the life that can re-create whatever has become degraded to the point of complete loss: if the wooden box rots, says Augustine, the living intelligible truth of the box in the mind of the artisan can form a new wooden box (I.17, 2, p. 56). And of course, it is crucially important for Augustine that this living Wisdom, which is both creative and redemptive precisely because it is so truly life itself, is none other than the Word: “If, then, Christ is the Wisdom

    

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of God, and the Psalm says, ‘You have made all things in wisdom,’ as all things were made through him, so they were made in him” (I.16, 1, p. 55). Just after this Augustine refers to the archetype of the earth existing within Wisdom as a kind of reason (ratio quaedam) which exists in a spiritual way (spiritualiter), that is, as the very life and inexhaustible intelligibility of God. But why is it so significant that Augustine points to the creative ideas within the mind of a human artisan in order to help his readers consider the re-creative power of the eternal ideas within the mind of God? Because, I believe, in alluding to the re-creative capacity of the imperishable ideas in eternal Wisdom, Augustine may be evoking for us a surprising recognition: namely that there is an analogy deeply worth exploring between Wisdom’s power to re-create each creature according to its idea in the mind of God, and the human mind’s raising of each creature to a new form of intelligible existence according to its idea in the mind of a human knower. To ponder such analogies may seem unduly speculative in our day, and yet for much of the history of Christian thought such parallels and analogies assisted Christians in perceiving their lives and their world as imbued with a mystical divine intimacy—God the Word as innermost in every existing being, speaking each creature’s intelligible truth and so calling it continually into being. For thinkers like Augustine, the rational mind’s interaction with other creatures can indeed echo the Trinity’s creative and re-creative power. This is possible because God’s eternal knowing and loving of God includes within itself the archetypes, the divine Wisdom, by which all things are created and understood, understood, that is, by angels and humans as well as God. The divine ideas tradition, in other words, gave Christians a way of articulating and elucidating not simply the beauty of creation as God’s good gift but, even more profoundly, the beauty of creation as a theophany of God’s creative and redemptive knowing and loving. This beauty, because of its intelligibility (and the rational capacity of the creatures to recognize this intelligibility), might engage the whole creation in a divinely initiated conversation—whose consummation is the communion of all creatures in God. As I suggested in the previous chapter, I think that the divine ideas tradition frequently served to “operationalize” the doctrine of the Trinity. Across the range of Christian doctrines, the divine ideas highlight the fact that the intelligibility of creation is like a word that awakens the rational mind, and the beauty of creaturely intelligibility is like a spiritual desire that arouses the rational will. And in this way Christians were able to conceive the whole creation as sacramental of the Trinitarian life, embraced within the inexhaustible knowing and loving which is God.

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    

Few Christian thinkers more deftly wielded these fluent connections and analogies offered by the ideas than Bonaventure. Near the beginning of his Journey of the Mind to God (II.7), the great follower of St. Francis intricately weaves the thread of divine presence through the tapestry of creation, beckoning created minds to recognize and respond to God’s address to them through all the creatures. I suggested just above that we might hear in Augustine’s reflections on how creatures are raised to intelligible life (in the minds that know them) an echo of the re-creative life granted to creatures according to their eternal archetypes in the divine mind. Bonaventure develops such analogical and indeed mystical perceptions even more pervasively. He reminds his readers that every creature impresses its likeness within the mind that knows it, and this likeness or species is the intelligible form by which the mind, as it were, receives the birth of the creature in the mind’s understanding. Bonaventure then likens this coming forth of the idea or likeness in the mind of a rational creature to another kind of birth: If, therefore, all knowable things must generate a likeness of themselves, they manifestly proclaim that in them, as in mirrors, can be seen the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son eternally emanating from God the Father.¹⁸

This wonderful mirroring of the eternal generation of the Word, by the impression each creature makes within a rational knower, is but one variation among Bonaventure’s themes. Not content with this analogy alone, Bonaventure insists that the very fact that all creatures are intelligible (i.e., capable of impressing their ideas within rational minds) results directly from the fact that all creatures flow from their intelligible exemplar in the Word, who is himself the Exemplar of the Father. Thus Bonaventure portrays the created order’s ability to impress its intelligible form or species as an idea within rational minds as mirroring at least three fundamental Christian mysteries: not only the mystery of the eternal begetting of the Word from the Father (as we just noted above), but also the mystery of the continuous act of creation as the Word impresses his exemplar intelligibility within each creature (causing it to exist as precisely what it is), and also the mystery of salvation as the Word impresses his exemplar meaning within the lives of believers causing them to know the Father. First Bonaventure draws the analogy between a creature’s intelligibility, its species, giving rise to an intelligible impression or idea within a rational mind and the eternal begetting of the Word:

    

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since the perceived species is a similitude generated in the medium and then impressed on the organ itself, it leads us to its starting point, that is, to the object to be known, this process manifestly suggests that the eternal light begets from itself a likeness, a coequal consubstantial, and coeternal splendor.¹⁹

Then he extends the analogy to the continuous act of creation and to redemption: We can perceive that he who is the image of the invisible God and the brightness of his glory and the image of his substance, who is everywhere by his first generation like an object that generates its similitude in the entire medium, is united by the grace of union to the individual of rational nature as the species is united with the bodily organ, so that through this union he may lead us back to the Father, as to the fountainhead and object.²⁰

Whenever a creature speaks its intelligible word within the mind of a rational knower, whenever creatures are united in the conversation of wisdom and understanding, says Bonaventure, they become radiant as mirrors reflecting at least three mysteries of faith: the eternal generation of God’s beloved, the creation in time of finite mundane beings, and most profoundly, the re-creative and redemptive journey of the creation into the eternal knowing and loving of the Trinity. What Christian theology has sometimes failed to articulate as fully as it should (a shortcoming that I believe the divine ideas tradition works to amend) is that this mind-awakening and contemplation-conducting presence of the Word is a presence making itself known not just in human existence but in and through the goodness and truth of all creation. The eminent Bonaventure scholar Zachary Hayes offers a particularly clarifying summary of this intrinsic connection between the Word and the whole creation: The Word is the full, immanent expression of all that the Father is in one who is other than the Father; the world is the external expression of the immanent Word. The world is what comes to be when the immanent Word is expressed in that which is not God; for as the Word is the otherness of the Father, the world is the otherness of the Word.²¹

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    

It is, I believe, the divine ideas teaching that accounts for this exemplarity or expression-in-otherness which is so prominent a theme in Bonaventure’s theology. The divine self-knowing, including the knowing of all possible creaturely ways of participating in the divine self-sharing, expresses itself in the eternal Word; and the coming to be of the creaturely world in and through the expressive Word accounts for the “word-fullness” of all creatures, for their communicativeness in virtue of the intelligible beauty of their embodied lives. For the exponents of the divine ideas teaching, it is a singular sign of the divine goodness that the creation includes rational creatures in whom the consciousness of creation’s “word-fullness” may come to fruition, quite literally in the Incarnation, thus drawing the whole creation into the divine conversation of Trinitarian life.

The Word as Medium of Creation’s Communion with God In this section, then, I want to examine more specifically the link that the divine ideas teaching forges between the theology of creation and Christology. For the divine ideas tradition was a particularly effective way for Christian thinkers to conceive of how God communicates through the creatures, illuminating rational minds, and establishing a shared participation in the life of Wisdom herself. As one leading scholar in the field puts it, many of the thinkers we are discussing come to equate the second person of the Trinity with the biblical figure of Wisdom, and understand by the name of Wisdom “a totality of forms” existing in God and coming to expression as created in time. According to some Christian writers the paradigms of all created things are contained within the Christ-Logos whose nature coincides with wisdom. Thus, Maximus cites the statement at I Cor 1:30 that Christ “was made for us by God as Wisdom” during an argument showing the dependence of all created things upon the paradigms (Ambig. 7 1081D), and Eriugena similarly quotes Psalm 104:24: “Thou has made all things in thy Wisdom” in support of his contention that God has established the primordial causes in his Son (Periph. II. 557A, Ibid. I, 455 C ff.).²²

Although we have seen many instances already of this understanding of the Word or Wisdom of God as the locus of the creative divine ideas, it’s helpful now to realize how significantly fruitful this notion comes to be as

    

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Christology develops in the history of Christian thought. As the incarnate Word, Christ, in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1.19, NRSV), also comes to be seen as bearing within himself the truth of all creatures—and as, therefore, the supreme source of understanding and communication among the creatures; not only the light that lightens every understanding (as in John’s prologue), but the medium for creaturely selfunderstanding, the lover who awakens creaturely desire for fulfillment in God. Not surprisingly, Origen, one of the first great commentators of the Christian church on the Song of Songs, evokes this mysterious conjunction of revelation and beauty as the Word through whom all things were made communicates himself and awakens a response: The soul is moved by heavenly love and longing when, having clearly beheld the beauty and the fairness of the Word of God, it falls deeply in love with his loveliness and receives from the Word himself a certain dart and wound of love. For this Word is the image and splendor of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, in whom were all things created that are in heaven and on earth, seen and unseen alike. If then a man can so extend his thinking so as to ponder and consider the beauty and the grace of all the things that have been created in the Word, the very charm of them will so smite him, the grandeur of their brightness will so pierce him as with the chosen dart – as says the prophet – that he will suffer from the dart himself a saving wound, and will be kindled with the blessed fire of his love.²³

The intelligible beauty of creation, says Origen, is the self-communication of the Word and for that very reason it arouses longing in those who contemplate it, kindling in them “the blessed fire of his love,” because the truth and reality it invites the beholder to ponder is life or communion itself, that is, the expression of the divine life within creation. Yet as Christian theology and spirituality develop, it becomes clear that the desire Origen speaks of is not merely a bare desire of a creature for the creator but rather, through the facility of the divine ideas tradition to hold Trinity and creation together, the desire reveals itself more identifiably as the desire of creatures to understand their own truth—and consummately their own truth as the very life they live in God. Maximus, carefully developing notions inherited from Origen, highlights the role of Christ the Logos not only in bringing creatures to their existence in time but in mediating and accomplishing within himself the communion with the full truth of themselves for which they long:

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     Because he held together in himself the logoi before they came to be, by his gracious will he created all things visible and invisible out of non-being . . . . For we believe that a logos of angels preceded their creation, a logos preceded the creation of each of the beings and powers that fill the upper world, a logos preceded the creation of human beings, a logos preceded everything that receives its becoming from God, and so on . . . . This same Logos, whose goodness is revealed and multiplied in all the things that have their origin in him, with the degree of beauty appropriate to each being, recapitulates all things in himself.²⁴

Notice how Maximus here points especially to the Logos as the one in whom all beings find their unity; they were “held together” in the Logos “before they came to be” and they find themselves drawn consummately together and freshly expressed in the Logos during their earthly life. Maximus also highlights the fact that the beauty of each creature is the goodness of the Logos revealing and multiplying itself in everything. Here we can perhaps see why the theme of Wisdom (holding together the unity of the ideas in God with the fullness of their expression in creation) becomes especially important for Christian thinkers. For it allows them to notice the mysterious experience of creatures, especially rational creatures, as they awaken to a self-awareness that also leads them yearningly towards a fuller self or rather a communion in which their true self can be discovered. Maximus points directly to this longing of the creation for unity with the deep truth of itself in the Word, a longing that the Word engenders by speaking within the creature the truth of its being in time and thus awakening its deep desire for the imperishable source and consummation of its reality. I am speaking of a firm and steadfast disposition, a willing surrender, so that from the One from whom we have received being we long to receive being moved as well. It is like the relation between an image and its archetype. A seal conforms to the stamp against which it was pressed, and has neither desire nor capability to receive an impression from something else, or to be put it forthrightly, it does not want to. Since it lays hold of God’s power or rather becomes God by divinization and delights more in the displacement of those things perceived to be naturally its own.²⁵

The implications of this vision of the created order, especially as articulated in Maximus, reward an attentive theological imagination. As the Word

    

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continually expresses the divine meaning in all things, the creatures are drawn towards this divine self-expression in which they find themselves; as Maximus puts it, “so that from the One from whom we have received being we long to receive being moved as well.”²⁶ The ongoing expression of the Word in all creatures is the drawing of finite existence into being out of nothing; or put reciprocally it is the drawing of created being into the intelligible truth of the Word—all the logoi, whether in their eternal form as divine ideas or in their created expression as the intelligible truth of creatures, are always aspects, echoes, of the one Logos who speaks them. Maximus likens this Christological grounding of all creatures to an impression or seal that “desires” above all to express, to be one with, the stamp or archetype that has given it existence. Indeed, for Maximus it would be fair to say that, were it not for the Fall, the freely giving embodiment of the Word in creation would always also be the continuous unifying of creation with the Word, in other words its divinization.²⁷ In the divine ideas tradition, then, it is the continual and radiant selfcommunication of the Word in every creature that accounts for (a) the creature’s existence, (b) the ongoing connection and desire for unity between the creature’s finite embodied intelligible form and its archetypal reality in God, and (c) the luminous and intelligible beauty of the creatures as their divine meaning awakens a response in their fellow rational creatures. We can see a particularly robust and vivacious portrayal of this Christological integration of the archetypal or exemplary idea with its earthly embodiment in Meister Eckhart. Indeed as the foremost scholar of Christian mystical traditions Bernard McGinn observes, “Eckhart frequently moves back and forth between a discussion of the ideas of things to a discussion of their archetypal Idea, that is the Word or Logos, in order to show the isomorphic relation between the two.”²⁸ In his exegesis of John’s prologue, Eckhart considers how the Word is not only the life but the light of humankind by emphasizing this isomorphic relation, as McGinn puts it, between the Word who is both the archetypal Idea of Godself and all God’s creatures and also therefore the continual ground of each creature’s idea, the reason for its intelligibility to other rational beings. Deploying the same analogy of the artisan that we can also find in Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas among others, Eckhart helps us to think about the relationship between the creative idea in the mind of a maker and its finite expression: The chest in the mind or in the art itself is neither a chest nor something already made, but it is art itself, is life, the vital concept of the Maker . . . the

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     Word, as idea, belongs to the rational faculty, which is proper to man . . . therefore, the Word is not only life, but the life is the light of men . . . . The Word, the idea and art itself, shines as much by night as by day. It illuminates things hidden within as much as those manifested without . . . . Further, it is more correct to say that in the case of created things only their ideas shine . . . . This is what is said of the Word here – that it is the ‘light of men,’ namely their Idea.²⁹

Because the Word is the Idea of God who bears within himself the ideas of all creatures, says Eckhart, it is always he who communicates from within the creatures this light, this knowledge-granting idea by which the truth of the creatures becomes knowable to humankind. Eckhart suggests that in the “darkness of this world” the shining of truth and the understanding of truth is always a sign of the Word as bearer of the ideas. Of course, for Eckhart as for all other exponents of the divine ideas teaching, it is also Christ who is at work illuminating the human person who encounters Christ, radiant as the idea at the heart of each creature. It is in this sense, I have been arguing, that for the divine ideas teaching Christ the Word is the ever present medium of communication among the creatures, the common language for their mutual sharing in the common life of the Trinity. We can see in Bonaventure a particularly explicit statement of this role of Christ as the inner teacher who, in virtue of bearing within himself the ideas or species of every being, is able to illuminate the understanding of those who perceive these beings. It is Christ, says Bonaventure, who is the necessary mediator of all creation’s reality, its light, for it is he the Truth himself “who knows the truth and possesses the truth within himself”: In the opinion of all the doctors, Christ teaches interiorly, so that no truth is known except through Him, not through speech as it is with us, but through inner enlightenment. Wherefore He must necessarily have within Himself the most clear species, which He cannot possibly have received from another. He Himself, then, is intimate to every soul and He shines forth by means of His most clear species upon the obscure species of our understanding. And in this manner, these obscure species, mixed with the darkness of images, are lit up in such a way that the intellect understands.³⁰

While of course there is more than one theological epistemology among those who make use of the divine ideas tradition,³¹ Bonaventure here exhibits most of the common features: the senses deliver to the mind an

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image, an incipient idea of what a person perceives; and in order for this to become fully radiant as meaning and truth, Christ, says Bonaventure, “shines forth by means of his most clear species upon the obscure species of our understanding.” Christ as the light of truth himself brings about within the rational creature a communion with the truth of its fellow creatures—and this is possible precisely because Christ as the Word incarnate bears within himself the original species or ideas that illuminate the rational creature’s apprehension of this same idea through its encounter with a fellow creature. For the divine ideas tradition we could say that the whole creation exists as a continuous event of communication and indeed communion—whose source is the eternal self-communication of the Trinity and whose goal is the fulfillment of creatures as they come more perfectly to share in this divine communion. The divine ideas teaching provides the crucial link or analogy between the act of communication in God and in creatures. As Thomas Aquinas observes, “Although the act of existence of creatures in the Word and their act of existing in themselves are not of the same character univocally, they are of the same character analogously.”³² For Thomas and the tradition we have been discussing, this analogous relationship—between the divine idea of each creature and its finite expression in embodied intelligibility—this analogous relationship is maintained precisely in and through the Word, who indeed contains the analogy within himself. But what happens when the analogy is investigated in narrowly philosophical terms, so that the analogy’s Trinitarian and Christological matrix is bracketed and no longer conceived as the irreplaceable context for understanding creation? The upshot of that is what we must explore in the next section.

Narratives of Disenchantment For this sovereign intelligible beauty of creation to be available to human knowers, of course, meant human knowers believed that the divine idea of each being was both (a) expressed in the creaturely form and (b) that this intelligible form was also accessible to the human mind. By early modernity both (a) and (b) were seen as less and less credible within dominant elite circles: for (a) the inner properties of things, insofar as they were thought to be accessible to the new science, were understood as knowable in ways wholly sufficient to their instrumental uses—without any need to regard

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this knowable data as also always a sign of the Creator; and (b) at the same time as the creatures were thus being sequestered away from any divine authoring of their consummate meaning, they were also coming to be seen (in dominant philosophical views) as unknowable to the human mind in their essence—or rather that their “essence” was but the combination of reflections aroused in human consciousness by the physical matter, and then re-applied upon the thing by the human knower as a way of constructing the thing’s meaning and significance.³³ In order to realize something of the momentous impact these shifts had upon the significance of creation’s beauty, it will be useful to consider the leading narratives that seek to understand how the more sacramental or contemplative stance towards creation became inaccessible to us today. It might be more accurate to say that there are competing narratives that seek to understand modernity’s “secularization” process. One position, often associated with the early twentieth-century scholar Max Weber, sees modernity as having been brought, mostly by the explanatory power of modern science, to the point at which inherited spiritual and religious traditions could no longer make plausible sense, in which the world becomes “disenchanted” and unable to point to God. A contrasting position (among many others) argues that the disenchanting of modern culture of which Weber spoke did not stem from early modern science (and the “rationalization” of society that flows from it) so much as from late medieval religious thought— thought that had, indeed, dismissed the divine ideas as a theological error threatening to divine simplicity and sovereignty. This form of thought had also, not coincidentally, held the visible form of creation to be mute with respect to its divine maker. Understanding the broad outlines of these disenchantment narratives will give us a useful heuristic background, allowing us to glimpse the changing significance of the divine ideas tradition for those who attempt to see God’s “eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are . . . through the things he has made” (Rom 1:20). In his now famous 1917 lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” Weber was actually giving voice to (but also problematizing) a long-standing Romantic era complaint against the prevailing scientific positivism and mechanization of nature that seemed to be stripping the world of transcendent meaning and purpose: “the increasing rationalization and intellectualization . . . means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.”³⁴ Literary scholars have perceptively noted that Weber’s talk is in fact an ironic re-voicing of themes in

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the writings of the Romantic era thinkers Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Heine, for whom the apparent un-godding or de-divinization of the natural world must be both lamented and also, subtly, deployed as a critique.³⁵ Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece” provoked an uproar upon its release in 1788, arousing suspicions that its “elegy for pagan enchantment was really a covert form of atheism.”³⁶ Whatever Schiller’s intentions, the poem laments the passing away of an animistic experience of nature suffused with divinity; Sara Lyons comments: “Like Weber, Schiller attributes the disenchantment of the world to both Christianity and modern science: Christianity purged the Greek pantheon in the interests of concentrating worship on a single, transcendent God, while Newtonian physics reduced nature” to a hollow clock-work mechanism.³⁷ It’s important to notice that such accounts of secularization assume a very specific (and peculiarly late medieval) notion of absolute divine transcendence that seems necessarily to entail an utter disconnection of divinity from the cosmos. We will see why this new notion of divine transcendence came oddly to be shorn of its normal correlate of divine immanence (of the divine giving of existence as innermost in each thing), and why creaturely existence was also no longer seen as bearing an analogy or as pointing symbolically towards God. Intriguingly Schiller, Weber, and our own contemporary interpreters of secularization all point as well towards a continuing hunger for enchantment, for ways in which the gods might “return” or be re-imagined. For the Romantics, “while a sense of nature’s divinity may have perished as a belief, it retains an immortal life in song or in poetry”; and yet, Lyons comments acutely, there is a curious trade-off demanded: on the one hand “the aesthetic seems like an agent of re-enchantment, compensating (however inadequately) for the pagan magic that has been lost,” but on the other hand “there is the possibility that the aesthetic, no less than science or Christianity, colludes in modern disenchantment: it seems to require the death of the gods to consummate” its poetic nostalgia and yearning.³⁸ And perhaps there are costs associated with this banishment of the divine from the world, costs not always fully understood. For there are other equally ambiguous hauntings of the banished spiritual meanings: Weber’s lecture includes ironic suggestions that the pagan gods have returned in the modern age, but now as driving impersonal forces which require our sacrifices every bit as much as had the Olympians: “Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over

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our lives and again resume their eternal struggle with one another.”³⁹ Spoken in the immediate wake of the Great War and during the maelstrom of events that would lead to the rise of Fascism, Weber’s words are chilling; they seem to brood over the dangers of spiritual forces in a culture with no conceptual room for those realities, no ability to recognize or locate them with coherence. Similarly, though from a very different perspective, Mark Edmundson’s essay, Nightmare on Mainstreet: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic probes the eruptive reaction of spiritual hungers trapped (and exposed to endless perversions) within the sanitized, brightly-lit, perpetually smiling world of mid-twentieth-century American culture.⁴⁰ And from an even broader perspective, Victoria Nelson in her Secret Life of Puppets traces Western culture’s post-Renaissance attempts to regain contact with transcendence and the supernatural, with the power of ritual action and symbolic codification to engage with the latent spiritual forces of the cosmos: In our officially postreligious culture, we miss the idols, too, and we have similarly aestheticized them. Just as the mad scientist figure carries the negative but still highly charged projection of the holy man who would otherwise have no place in our living culture, the repressed religious is also visible in representations of puppets, robots, cyborgs, and other artificial humans in literature and film. It endures as a fascination with the spiritualizing of matter and the demiurgic infusion of soul into human simulacra . . . . These simulacra, from killer puppets to indestructible cyborgs, came to carry the burden of our outlawed but tenacious belief in the holiness of graven images, and behind that in the immortality of the human soul.⁴¹

This theme of the displacement of the supernatural (and its eruptive reaction) points to a dimension of human longing that simple “advancement of science = retreat of religion” narratives too often render obscure or even efface entirely. In fact as a diverse but impressive range of scholars are now showing, early modern scientific ways of thinking have themselves been fully open to the human hunger for a spiritual dimension in life—indeed, they have often been animated by religious beliefs.⁴² The growing success of modern science, I am arguing, would not in and of itself have led to the divorce between the natural and the supernatural. Science in itself does not lead to the notion that simply because a tree can be understood in terms of its chemical or molecular structures, it cannot also be understood in terms

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of its spiritual significance, i.e., in terms of its divine meaning inherent in God’s eternal knowledge. For that rejection we need to look for a religious, indeed a very particular theological influence, and it is precisely this that the other more complicated narratives of disenchantment have identified. Among these alternative accounts of Western culture’s passage to modernity, one important factor has been Christian theology’s own role in dimming the sacramental light of nature and driving the supernatural ever farther from participation by the human mind. Incautious experimentation with freshly arrived, newly translated, Aristotelian ideas in the mid-1200s, especially amongst the Arts faculties, alarmed the theological authorities sufficiently that over two hundred propositions drawn from a wide range of texts were condemned by the Archbishop of Paris in 1277. For our purposes, the fundamental anxiety that the condemnation underscored was the seeming conviction that human reason could so comprehensively conceive the structures of reality as to lay down principles that appeared to constrain the sovereignty of God. While it’s easy to overestimate the direct impact of the condemnation and its fresh imposition by two Archbishops of Canterbury, in 1277 and 1286, one can certainly notice the care of subsequent theology to emphasize precisely those themes which the condemnations were meant to protect: the absolute transcendence, freedom, and unknowability of God, the utter dependence of the created order upon this free and unknowable divine will, and the perpetual need for chastened human reason to depend scrupulously upon biblical revelation for its religious understanding.⁴³ Not surprisingly, one result of this new conservative impulse in theology, especially as it developed and intensified through the influence of two Franciscan thinkers, Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (d. 1347), was that reason was regarded much less expansively, as being exclusively natural and as un-illumined by the divine ideas. And reason, thus “naturalized,” was happy to return the favor, often proceeding autonomously from religious concerns. Theology, in asserting its superior and minatory authority, came to find itself talking to an empty room—its university colleagues increasingly content to observe the strict divide that theology insisted on imposing between itself and all merely natural forms of inquiry. Why was this attempt to “protect God” from the predations of human reason so challenging for Christian reverence and care for the divine goodness of creation? Certainly it meant that late medieval natural philosophy and its child, early modern science, were advanced by thinkers who had been strictly warned not to render their judgments in any way that might bear

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upon the relation of the creation to the Creator. Discussing Ockham’s strictures against reason with respect to matters of religion, Hans Blumenberg suggests that “raising theology to its maximal pretension over against reason had the unintended result of reducing theology’s role in explaining the world to a minimum, and thus of preparing the competence of reason as the organ of a new kind of science that would liberate itself from the tradition.”⁴⁴ And unfortunately, not only was reason instructed to avoid drawing theological implications from its investigation of the world; the Nominalist denial of universals (and thus of creation’s participation in or expression of the divine ideas) meant that when reason investigated creation, it mustn’t imagine that it might also be coming to sense “the thoughts of the hidden God” or to “pose the question of the divine conception of the world.”⁴⁵ What Blumenberg calls the “theological absolutism” of Nominalism led to a vision of creation shorn of divine intelligibility, no longer an epiphany of divine meaning and goodness but a blank assertion of divine will. Summarizing Blumenberg’s now seminal argument, Stephen McKnight observes: “Metaphysical speculation, particularly under the weight of Nominalism’s theological absolutism, had broken the interconnection between the knowable cosmos, man’s reason, and God’s nature and purpose.”⁴⁶ The divine ideas tradition, as we have seen, was crucial in holding these three dimensions together—and certainly this severing of the lines of cosmic intelligibility would seriously undermine the fate of the divine ideas and their credibility as a theological perspective. Blumenberg’s narrative highlights this breaking apart of a threefold interconnection among the creation, God, and human beings. But his argument is somewhat submerged within a vast and epic claim about modernity’s emergence in reaction to Nominalism (which Blumenberg sees as a new kind of Gnosticism), and for our purposes it will be helpful to see the illuminating clarity given to the story more recently in the important works of Louis Dupré. Dupré reminds us that long before the late medieval developments we’re considering, Christianity had, in two crucial ways, fully re-conceived the inherited sense of nature’s intelligibility—but not abandoned it. The intrinsic logos that the ancients sensed in all things is far from being lost as a result of the Christian doctrine of creation, for the act of creation “transfers a form aboriginal in God to an extra-divine existence,” and this means that while nature or the cosmos is no longer itself seen as a divine being, God’s presence “continues to dwell within creation” for the living divine idea of each creature animates each creature’s mundane life: “Ex-pressing in time what from all eternity resides in God, nature retains an intrinsically

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normative character.”⁴⁷ As we have already seen, writers in the divine ideas tradition highlighted this sacramental, even normative, character of creation as a sign of God and instructive reflection of divine Wisdom. “Nature itself re-presented God and this representation laid the basis for a theology of the image and for an original Christian mysticism.”⁴⁸ The sacramental cosmos was even more profoundly transfigured by the doctrine of the Incarnation. The historical particularity of Jesus Christ, and the apparent desolation of nature suffered by Him in his passion, seemed to obscure the signifying depths of creation as a whole and to put it under question. Yet Christian thinkers worked creatively to hold the intelligible and meaningful expression of creation together with its conversion and consummation in Christ. Eriugena, for example, pointed to the Paschal mystery of Christ as restoring the whole of humanity (and nature as represented in the human): “If Christ Who understands all things, [Who] indeed is the understanding of all things, really unified all that He assumed, who doubts but that what first took place in the Head and principal Exemplar of the whole of human nature will eventually happen to the whole?”⁴⁹ In this fine example of the divine ideas tradition, transformed soteriologically (as we will see more fully in Chapter 3), Christ bears within himself the truth of all creation and so is the incarnate Understanding of all things, its consummate revelation; and he is so not in any static sense but precisely through the full historical sweep of his incarnation, by which creation is re-united with its true goodness and reality and carried through the conversion of death and resurrection into its full reality. Dupré does not himself point to Eriugena in this regard but pivots to the intensifying devotion of St. Francis and his followers to the individual form of Jesus Christ. This new attention to the physical singularity of Christ “granted to individual form” a new definitiveness—not only as pointing to the eternal reality in God but as itself the epiphany of the mysterious divine depths: thus began a daring cosmic symbolism that endowed each facet of nature with inexhaustible expressiveness. Far from being added to nature, this symbolical potential constituted its very essence. To the medieval mind, nature appeared intrinsically symbolic. A merely literal reading of nature would have fallen short of a full understanding.⁵⁰

In Dupré’s narrative, the Franciscan Bonaventure concentrates and grounds this cosmic symbolism within the Word, and above all the Word made flesh. Thus the Word or Son’s perfect imaging and representation of the Father,

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his exemplarity, radiates in and as the intelligible world of the divine ideas; and this radiant exemplarity expresses itself in various ways in the mundane existence of every creature—which is the ground and basis for the “cosmic symbolism that endowed each facet of nature with inexhaustible expressiveness,” in Dupré’s words. So much was, with some variation, the standard view within the divine ideas tradition; what Bonaventure does, inspired by Francis’ devotion and singular physical sharing (through the stigmata) in the particularity of Jesus is profoundly to intensify the emphasis on the concrete expression of the ideas in the incarnate Christ. “Bonaventure preserved the traditional rationes aeternae (the universal Platonic forms) within God but placed them in the incarnated individual Word as in their divine archetype.”⁵¹ In Dupré’s view, however, what Bonaventure developed as a creative new Christological focus, was radically individualized in the later Franciscans Duns Scotus and Ockham—severing the ties between the creatures, their universal archetypes in God, and the human mind. We can integrate Dupré’s narrative with Blumenberg’s reading of Duns and Ockham as sharing in a conservative reaction to reason’s expansionary vision in theology. The later Franciscans’ focus on the concrete individual reality of Christ severely constricted the mind’s access through the cosmic Christ to any illumination—at whatever remove—from divine ideas of the creatures; and it equally tended to eclipse notions of the Word’s continuous speaking of the ideas in calling creatures into being. Neither of these occlusions, I am arguing, was present in Bonaventure himself, but they do emerge in the theological environment after the condemnations of 1277 and their aftermath. As Dupré observes, “if the essence of all ideas resides in an individual [Christ], the weight of knowledge shifts from the abstract universal to the singular.”⁵² Perhaps Bonaventure’s inclination as a spiritual and mystical teacher led him to have confidence that the mind, ardent with love for the incarnate and crucified Lord, would journey into the heart of the coincidence of opposites, where the universal and the singular are one in Christ, as at the conclusion of his Journey of the Mind into God. There certainly the ultimate state of knowing is apophatic, a participative sharing in the universal truth of all creation in God, but, as we have seen, Bonaventure always holds that mystical knowledge in dialectical relationship with the cataphatic exemplarity, the intelligible beauty and goodness, of the creatures. In Dupré’s narrative, while Duns Scotus does not deny the very existence of the universal archetypes in God (as Ockham will), he does insist that what we know when we encounter anything is not its (universal) intelligible form but precisely its unique individuality and distinctness. A tree is no longer

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iconic, a doorway for theological contemplation to encounter the divine knowing and loving of its existence in God; it is just a tree—whose existence cannot, indeed must not, tell us anything of God other than the brute fact that the divine will has decreed its existence. The divine ideas tradition had for centuries resourced most accounts of human knowing, because “knowledge rested on the assumption that the real is intrinsically intelligible,” and this meant that in every noetic act the intelligible form, by which every creature is what it is, is also the same intelligible form by which the human mind thinks and knows that creature (“the mind merely actualizes what is already cognizable”)—and whether that form was embodied in a creature or expressed intelligibly in a knowing mind, it was present as a reflection within time of its eternal archetype in the mind of God; but as Dupré points out, for Ockham this entire arrangement was doubly problematic, for it presupposed an epistemology that prioritized the universal over the empirically-known individual, and it seemed to “confine” the divine freedom within the bounds of the ideas: “Ockham no longer takes such a built-in harmony between mind and nature for granted, which subjects God’s ways of creation to human norms. Even the assumption that in knowledge the mind shares a universal form with the real, however deeply entrenched in the tradition, is abandoned.”⁵³ It strikes me that Ockham’s anxiety about subjecting God to human knowing could never have been taken seriously in earlier eras, for the very reason that the common view, clearly on display in Augustine and Aquinas for example, is that God’s Trinitarian knowing and willing of Godself is the ground of the creature’s existence and intelligibility. For them and for most of the tradition, we know things indeed because they exist with inherent intelligibility, but things do so exist because God has eternally known and willed them to be: our knowing of things, in this view, is dependent upon their existence, but God’s knowing of things is the cause of their existence. For Maximus or Bonaventure, for example, it would be inconceivable that God could somehow be constrained by God’s own nature (in that aspect of it that humankind refers to as the divine ideas of the creatures), any more than that God could be constrained by acting according to God’s own wisdom or goodness. The later medieval Nominalist anxiety zealously to guard God’s freedom and pre-eminence could only have emerged in an era when the knowing of the human subject is increasingly prioritized as the determining event with respect to creatures and their meaning, as constructing a meaning that doesn’t otherwise inhere in things—such that God needs to be protected from the overreaching of human reason by a sequestration of the supernatural from the natural.

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Ockham and the Nominalist movement in theology worked to achieve this end by re-emphasizing in a massively influential way an old distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God: while the cosmos as we know it is what God has happened to ordain and cause, God’s absolute power could have made everything completely otherwise, and nothing that presently exists can therefore point in the least way to God or confine God.⁵⁴ “Nominalist theologies of God’s omnipotence,” Dupré argues, destroyed the intelligible continuity between creator and creature. The idea of an absolute divine power unrelated to any known laws or principles definitively separated the order of nature from that of grace. Such a nature created by an unpredictable God has lost its intrinsic intelligibility in favor of the mere observation of actual fact. Nor does creation itself teach us anything of God beyond what this divine omnipotence has revealed in Scripture . . . . Detached from its transcendent moorings, nature was left to chart its own course. The rise of the supernatural signaled the loss of an intrinsically transcendent dimension in nature and the emergence of a profound distrust of that nature on the part of theology.⁵⁵

Dupré’s narrative of nature’s increasingly ambivalent standing in theology clearly exposes the ways in which the loss of the divine ideas tradition bereaves nature of its theological significance and intelligibility. Theology’s late medieval anxiety about the divine intelligibility of nature, I am suggesting, diminished a significant strand of reverent contemplative attention to creation. Moreover, if theology insisted that divine meaning was radiant no more in nature, then humankind would be free to see and impose its own meanings—and uses— upon nature. Terry Eagleton captures the exuberant upshot of late medieval nominalism, liberating for humanism, the new philosophy, and science but also, one can foresee, troubling for human treatment of the natural world: All this, to be sure, was at the same time an enormous liberation. There was simply no longer one valid way of reading reality. The priests no longer monopolized the keys to the kingdom of meaning. Freedom of interpretation was now possible. Men and women no longer had to kowtow to the ready-made meanings which God had folded into the world. The sacred text of the universe, in which physical elements were allegorical signs of spiritual truths, gradually gave way to a secular script. Emptied of prefabricated meanings, reality could now be construed according to the needs and desires of humanity.⁵⁶

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Whether the “keys to the kingdom of meaning” were really monopolized in earlier eras seems perhaps something of an exaggeration, given the extravagant playfulness and profusion of symbolic and allegorical readings of nature and history throughout the Middle Ages. But I hope in the final chapter of this book to see whether and how the divine ideas tradition might have sustained a reading of the “text of the universe” that could yet engender a contemplative awareness and reverence for divine meaning in the creation.

The Lostness of Eden: Obscurities of Nature, Knowledge, and Language in Early Modernity In the previous section I suggested how the via moderna of the later Middle Ages, usually associated with Nominalism and a heightened emphasis on the absolute power of God, diminished the theological credibility of the divine ideas tradition. My hunch is that this diminished theological significance made it all the easier for elements of the divine ideas teaching to be put to work in early modernity upon chores for which the divine ideas were never theologically intended, and therefore in ways that all but guaranteed their perceived oddity and obsolescence. Caution is in order nonetheless. For a systematic theologian such as myself, with strong interests in the history of Christian spirituality and mystical theology, this early modern period presents unparalleled opportunities to hazard spectacularly heroic over-generalizations. The period’s enthralling tumult of religion, politics, magic, new philosophies, old alchemies, and new sciences seems to cry out for exactly the kind of “masterful” explanations of everything’s intersection with everything else that can only betray themselves by their own grandiosity. And yet for the sake of a general heuristic let me propose the following: early modern thinkers urgently desired to derive increased benefits for humankind from nature’s hidden powers, and this desire only intensified under the rule of empirical investigation; somewhat paradoxically, this intensifying pressure and expectation of success led to the “scientific” application to nature of notions and theories closely linked to the divine ideas tradition—often in such a manner that their authentic theological context and use were circumvented or grossly re-purposed by an intense desire to wring magical results from nature’s occult properties. At the risk of my own quixotic over-generalization, let me nonetheless offer a preliminary synoptic view of the fundamental shifts that I suggest have made the divine ideas tradition much less visible in our own era.

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Consider the early modern crises of knowledge. If physical things are no longer thought to echo spiritual reality and yet we derive our language from the inherent truthfulness of things, and if things themselves can no longer yield their inner essence to the human mind, then what is real? And what language can speak truthfully? And what can the mind know certainly? One way of thinking about all this is to focus on the relentless and, at times, profoundly anxious quest for the certain sources of things—whether this is figured as a return to a primordial innocence in Eden, to a pure and unprejudiced reading of Scripture, or an irreducible basis of material reality. As the return to ancient sources in Renaissance humanism was echoed by the reduction to microscopic perception in the new science, the heroic conviction that such an indubitable and definable ground could be reached was persistently undermined by the creeping awareness of historical context, cultural construction, and the merely pragmatic use of language. And of course as changing perceptions of reality shape human consciousness, so too does our notion of how language grapples onto reality change: analogy, metaphor, allegory—all prized as the most adroit modes of speaking about a reality that is itself manifold across all the spheres from heaven to earth—are increasingly seen as recklessly endangering our grasp of things whose existence is now unencumbered by any spiritual or symbolic kinship with the rest of the cosmos. The search for what was behind – behind in time, but also behind the surface – was largely a search for an elusive essence . . . . the Renaissance intellectuals had neither an established scientific means for gaining access to essences, nor an agreement on what “essence” even meant. Were they still looking for some divine first principle, or were they ready to look into something like molecular structure?⁵⁷

At the same time, moreover, the intellectual pressure that empiricism applies to early modern culture begins to marginalize the credibility of more ancient approaches to reality, such as alchemy, that in fact depended on an underlying metaphysics in which the divine ideas figured importantly: It was impossible for alchemy long to survive the collapse of the analogical universe. Alchemy is the practical attempt to realize the spiritual essence, or telos, of matter. It assumes that the objective existence of a thing is only a representation of its ideal form.⁵⁸

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In other words, the analogical universe (in which alchemy could make reasonable sense) is a universe dependent upon the notion that everything on earth reflects in finite form an exemplar in the heavens or, in more theological terms of course, in the mind of God. In order to understand more fully the profound significance of this analogical universe, especially for early modern mages and natural philosophers, it will be helpful to consider two of the most influential theoreticians of the age: Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the eminent Florentine scholarpriest-physician, the first to translate the entirety of Plato into Latin, as well as Plotinus and other important Greek texts from the ancient world; and Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), whose treatise Natural Magick first appeared in Italian in 1558, and was so popular that it appeared in numerous editions and was translated into multiple European languages, finally appearing in English in 1658. Both Ficino and della Porta speak authoritatively, with a powerfully comprehensive aesthetic vision, of the entire multi-tiered universe—a universe harmonized throughout by the unfolding music of the ideas cascading from the mind of God, through the celestial intelligences of the heavens, and down into the most basic forms that imbue matter with life. In the following excerpt from one of his most widely read works, Ficino explains the important mediating function within the universe of the Anima Mundi or World-soul, whose role within the great chain of being sustains the analogy between the earthly beings and their heavenly archetypes, thus assuring the possibility that rejuvenation from the primordial ideas may be attained: In addition, the World-soul possesses by divine power precisely as many seminal reasons of things as there are Ideas in the Divine Mind. By these seminal reasons she fashions the same number of species in matter. That is why every single species corresponds through its own seminal reason to its own Idea and oftentimes through this reason it can easily receive something from the Idea – since indeed it was made through the reason from the Idea.⁵⁹

As we can see, the reflection of the ideas within the World-soul as seminal reasons makes possible the chain of correspondences between lower and higher elements of reality. Indeed, this section in Ficino’s great work Three Books on Life is in fact entitled “On Obtaining Life from the Heavens.” In his magisterial study of magic in Western culture, Brian Copenhaver observes that “prayer and magic are artificial imitations of this greater natural wonder,

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the myriad organic sympathies in the fabric of the cosmos.”⁶⁰ Renaissance magic or natural philosophy uses this structure, which is in fact an elaborate naturalization of the divine ideas, to achieve its effectiveness, whether in medicine, alchemy, or some other art. Ficino continues by emphasizing how to deploy these correspondences or analogies within the universe to achieve one’s desired end: This is why, if at any time the species degenerates from its proper form, it can be formed again with the reason as the proximate intermediary and, through the Idea as intermediary, can then be easily reformed. And if in the proper manner you bring to bear on a species, or on some individual in it, many things which are dispersed but which conform to the same Idea, into this material thus suitably adapted you will soon draw a particular gift from the Idea, through the seminal reason of the Soul: for, properly speaking, it is not the Intellect itself which is led, but Soul.⁶¹

Brian Copenhaver explains that for Ficino, the World-Soul generates the forms of natural things through seminal reasons, which stay in contact with the Ideas . . . . When the magus manipulates matter specified by forms, and linked with reasons of a given kind, he gains access through those reasons to the higher power of the same kind.⁶²

The very prominence, within this magically-oriented discourse, of notions so entirely connected with the divine ideas tradition could not but lead to their marginalization—especially as developments in the new science carried it farther and farther away from natural magic and its background metaphysics. We can see virtually the same vision of cosmic reality in della Porta. But now as the author’s gaze is turned yet more directly towards the useful benefits that natural philosophy or natural magic might unlock from nature’s hidden or occult properties, so the author’s rhetoric even more overtly couches his savoring of the divine powers hidden within nature in terms of an apparently cautious and conservative piety. The “operations” that the natural magician might unveil within the hierarchical structure of the universe are but the subservience of the lower orders to the higher, within the natural order of things that God has arranged. So then, seeing that forms come from heaven, they must needs be counted Divine and heavenly things: for such is the pattern and the most excellent

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cause of them, which Plato, that chief Philosopher, calls the soul of the World . . . . Seeing therefore this Form cometh from the Elements, from heaven, from the intelligences, yes from God himself; who is so foolish and untoward, as to say that it doth not favour of that heavenly nature, and in some sort of the Majesty of God himself? And that it doth not produce such effects, as nothing can be found more wonderful, seeing it hath such affinity with God? Thus hath the providence of God linked things together in their rankes and order, that all inferior things might by their due courses be derived originally from God himself, and from him receive their Operations.⁶³

Thus della Porta anxiously and yet suavely assures his readers that there could be nothing untoward or devilish about properly natural magic— especially since the power displayed so clearly derives from holy sources. Intriguingly, later natural philosophers were keen to attack precisely this point, i.e., to insist that there is no direct divine activity descending along the chain of being, no supernatural magic, at work within nature but simply the natural occurring mechanisms of things in themselves. Paradoxically, in order to magnify this assertion of theirs, early natural philosophers such as Joseph Glanville resorted to claiming that if there were any unaccounted effects produced by so-called magicians these must be derived not from divine and holy sources but by employing demons and witchcraft—thus fomenting in the name of a more naturalist account of reality a yet more fervent belief in the power of the demonic and preternatural.⁶⁴ As with Ficino, we can see in della Porta the practical implications of this cosmic analogical chain of being for the early natural philosopher, or more likely the magician—whom della Porta portrays as the mere “servant of nature” who uncloaks her secret powers in a manner carefully calculated to affirm the glory of God and, of course, the established hierarchy of things. . . . so the superior power cometh down even from the very first cause to these inferiours, deriving her force into them, like as it were a cord platted together, and stretched along from heaven to earth, in such sort as if either end of this cord be touched, it will wag the whole; therefore we may rightly call this knitting together of things, a chain, or link . . . These things a Magician being well acquainted withal, doth match heaven and earth together, as the Husband-man plants Elmes by his Vines; or to speak more plainly, he marries and couples together these inferior things by their wonderful gifts and powers, which they have received from their

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     superiours; and by this means he, being as it were the servant of Nature, doth bewray her hidden secrets, and bring them to light, so far as he hath found them true by his own daily experience, that so all men may love, and praise, and honour the Almighty power of God, who hath thus wonderfully framed and disposed all things.⁶⁵

Thus thinkers such as della Porta, Agrippa, Paracelsus, and John Dee all assiduously applied the divine ideas tradition and its entire network of associated concepts not only within practices such as alchemy but also within social and political discourses of sacred hierarchy—all of which stranded the divine ideas tradition on the quickly receding shore of notions left behind by modernity’s advance. Moreover, as the analogical metaphysics that reciprocally depended upon and nourished the divine ideas tradition began to wither, the use of the ideas in practices such as alchemy that depended on that analogical universe came to seem all the more outmoded if not indeed ridiculous, a fine basis for the farcical antics of charlatans in early modern comedies. Thus, over the course of the Renaissance, the divide grew ever sharper between practices such as alchemy and those we now associate with modern chemistry. For example, quests to unriddle the secret divine word of power hidden in natural things (which could unlock their chemical benefits) gradually separated, on the one hand, into scientific methods for determining a thing’s chemical formula, and on the other hand, into what came to be increasingly seen as laughable attempts to rediscover a supposedly lost language of Eden—in which God had spoken the divine idea or name of things directly with Adam and Eve, giving them power over the created order. The Elizabethan scholar John Dee, for instance, increasingly frustrated in his attempts to arrive at a universal mathematical understanding of nature, spent years struggling to persuade the more helpful sort of angels to re-introduce him to the secret divine ideas or names for things that Adam and Eve had forsaken in the Fall.⁶⁶ I’m suggesting, then, that as aspects of the divine ideas tradition were pressed into new utilitarian and empirical uses quite alien to their theological roots, the notion that the ideas might illuminate the human mind with the light of the divine Word speaking behind the phenomenal appearance of things came to seem more and more unreal, a curious if not comical bit of lore from a world modernity was eager to leave behind. As one eminent literary scholar observes with respect to a landmark text from the era: “Don Quixote parodies the struggle to look past the immediately apparent physical

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reality to the more exalted, bookish truth behind it—a good joke for an era trying to laugh off a thousand years of Western European ontology that deemed the world a mere delusive figure of the Word.”⁶⁷ A founding figure of modern science, Francis Bacon, is perhaps superficially remembered for insisting that we must put Nature on the rack to force her to reveal her secrets, but Bacon is careful to echo the pious language found in Ficino and della Porta. In advocating the investigation of efficient causes, he argues that such a pursuit of the intelligible laws at work in the material world need not close the mind to any reverence for the ultimate cause of all things in God. In the Advancement of Learning, Bacon twice quotes Ecclesiastes 3.11ff: “ ‘God hath made all things beautiful, or decent, in the true return of their seasons: Also he hath placed the world in man’s heart,’ ” going on to remark that here Solomon declar[es] not obscurely that God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light; and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.⁶⁸

Notice here Bacon’s seeming acceptance of the classical notion, much beloved of Renaissance Platonists, that the human mind is in a sense all things, because it can contain the intelligible forms or ideas of all things. Intriguingly, the second time Bacon refers to this verse from Ecclesiastes, it does indeed come as the capstone to his retrieval of the study of forms or ideas, the intelligibility of things. He insists that the invention of Forms [i.e., their uncovering through his method] is of all other parts of knowledge the worthiest to be sought, if it be possible to be found. As for the possibility, they are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea. But it is manifest that Plato in his opinion of Ideas, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry that the forms were the true object of knowledge; but lost the real fruit of his opinion, by considering of forms as absolutely abstracted from matter.⁶⁹

What has to happen, says Bacon, is that we need to investigate not the complex concatenation of forms at the level of appearance, but the

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underlying simple forms out of which physical entities emerge—just as we can learn to find out “simple letters” in order to understand the words that such letters compose. As it happens, says Bacon, humankind too quickly turns away from the particular matter in which it needs to discover the alphabet of laws and intelligible forms that govern in nature, and so the human mind distorts the divine ideas into its own faulty conceptions—the idols of the cave and tribe in Bacon’s well-known critique. Here is his lapidary summary from Book I of Novum Organum (I.23): “There is a great difference between the idols of the human mind and the ideas of the divine mind; that is to say, between certain empty opinions and the genuine signatures and marks impressed on created things.”⁷⁰ Intriguingly, however, Bacon’s seeming acceptance of the divine ideas tradition in his approach to nature can also be interpreted as cover for a very different perspective. Despite some familiar defensive gestures toward piety, toward God as at once the goal of all science and beyond all science, Bacon is reversing the epistemological flow. As Robert Watson observes, for Bacon idols are no longer the physical objects that, by demanding attention for themselves, stand between the human mind and the divine Word, the ultimate reality. What he condemns as idols are instead the words (and other customary practices, including “tribal” prejudices, which would seem to include religion, especially Catholicism) that stand between the human mind and physical objects, which he deems (as they are in modern Western science) the ultimate reality—a reality so drained of will, divine or otherwise, that its key identifying marker is its inability to act differently under identical stimuli—as required in scientific experimentation.⁷¹ Watson’s points are extremely instructive: for he clarifies how adroitly Bacon contrives not only to distance God from the objects of human inquiry but also simultaneously to detach from physical objects any lingering hints of supernatural life or animate agency. Other scholars have equally highlighted Bacon’s assertion of a fully contingent and voluntaristic vision of the universe, one in which human investigation should expect to find no clues whatsoever regarding the intentions or special benefits granted by the divine Author of things. Emphasizing God’s absolute freedom and power, Bacon figures nature as an orderly and coherent text, but one whose very language is but the contingent and arbitrary creation of its autonomous author. It is a language of contingent things, rather than a language of God’s symbolic traces stamped upon things.⁷²

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The aims and approaches on display in the respective works of Ficino, della Porta, and Bacon make clear the complicated interaction of early modern concepts of nature, knowledge, and language. As we have seen, in each of these domains the divine ideas tradition and associated concepts are deployed with only attenuated reference to their intrinsic Trinitarian and Christological grounds; instead they come to be associated with the background metaphysics of so-called natural magic, alchemy, and even witchcraft. They come to seem more and more like relics of another, less enlightened age. To summarize my point in this section, we might think of three continuums or polarities—all three of which in reality intersect and merge with one another, but for clarity’s sake let’s take them separately. Say that the first continuum is the range of early modern understandings of nature: at one extreme we might find the sense that every creature is a sign or symbol of the infinite spiritual reality from which it flows, and that at its heart is the continual speaking of the divine Word who calls it by its true name and upholds it in existence—this divine idea echoing expressively in its ground is each creature’s true essence, its intelligible form; at the other extreme we might find the view that every being is a combination of sensible phenomena which mediate an inaccessible sub-phenomenal matter that is not only inert and lifeless but which also bears no analogy or likeness to its phenomenal appearance—and which would need to be reduced to its microscopic, corpuscular, or atomic level in order to arrive at its reality. Carolyn Merchant famously summarized the upshot of this transition in her seminal work, The Death of Nature: The fundamental social and intellectual problem for the seventeenth century was the problem of order. The perception of disorder, so important to the Baconian doctrine of dominion over nature, was also crucial to the rise of mechanism as a rational antidote to the disintegration of the organic cosmos. The new mechanical philosophy of the mid-seventeenth century achieved a reunification of the cosmos, society, and the self in terms of a new metaphor – the machine . . . . The submergence of the organism by the machine engaged the best minds of the times during a period fraught with anxiety, confusion, and instability in both the intellectual and social spheres. The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature – the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution. Because nature was now viewed as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external,

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     rather than inherent forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature.⁷³

Needless to say the replacement of an organic vision of the cosmos by a concept of machine parts moved by external forces also spelled the end of any notion that each creature is a living, awe-inspiring embodiment of a divine idea, worthy of reverence and care. The second continuum or polarity would be the range of early modern views about the act of human knowing: at one end we would have the view, not dissimilar from the common view in early and medieval Christianity, that in the act of knowing the human mind abstracts from the experience of the senses an intelligible form or idea, and that the human mind is able to recognize this idea in order to know the truth of the external object because the mind is illuminated by God’s own eternal knowing of that idea in the Word of God; at the other end of the spectrum of views about human knowing we would have the notion that what we commonly think of as knowledge happens when the mind is moved by the sensible experience of empirical reality to recognize the phenomenal reality of things, named by common convention, and applied to things without necessarily gaining access to their sub-phenomenal reality. The intensifying suspicion among early modern thinkers that our knowledge of things is constrained within the categories of our own mental construction not only, of course, eliminated the role of divine presence in the noetic encounter among creatures but also effectively subjected nature to the devices and desires of the human mind alone. “Arrogating reality to the a priori categories of the human mind resembles exploiting all nature for the immediate service of human selfishness.”⁷⁴ These first two polarities about nature and knowledge should have already alerted us to the likely polarity in early modern views about language: at one end there would be the view that language in some sense still participates in the reality it names (almost as a vestige of the creative speech of God by which the naming of things is their calling into existence), and that language therefore truly mediates—often by means of symbolic, metaphorical, or heightened speech—genuine encounter with the essential nature of things. As Louis Dupré describes this view, language itself appears as an integral part of creation, not a separate, manmade universe that enables the human interpreter to reshape the meaning of nature at random. Language and nature constitute two complementary

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parts of one divine creation, of which one articulates the manifold meanings inherent in the other.⁷⁵

At the other extreme, we might find the view that language bears no relationship to the reality it names, in other words that its mediation of reality is purely conventional and therefore tells us nothing per se about the things spoken of but only about the relative views and authorities of the communities that impose language upon reality. Opposing such a Hobbesian insistence on the purely conventional view of language as necessarily subject to human control were the views of natural philosophers and religious thinkers such as Seth Ward, John Wilkins, and also non-conforming, more radical thinkers like John Webster, for whom true knowledge of the world depended on the divine infusion of the essentially endowed signs within nature into the hearts of the faithful . . . the radicals believed that words could embody the essence of things, becoming a part of nature in themselves. Rather than representing natural signs, such a language would present them to the mind immediately.⁷⁶

The more radical views often associated with belief in the possibility of recovering the so-called lost language of Eden, the primordial divine speech, were views that became increasingly embarrassing to exponents of the new science. Not surprisingly the appreciation of such views among later Romantic thinkers and poets did little to re-establish their credibility in modern science. We can perhaps best summarize the significance of these three developing polarities by pointing towards an even larger frame, namely what Charles Taylor has called the social or cultural imaginary: “The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society.”⁷⁷ In other words, the divine ideas tradition was not only marooned within increasingly obsolescent views of nature, knowledge, and language but also within an entire understanding of how the world works that was being left behind by our modern age. Taylor points to a premodern moral order that is organized around a notion of a hierarchy in society that expresses and corresponds to a hierarchy in the cosmos. These were often theorized in language drawn from the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of Form, but the underlying notion also emerges strongly in theories of correspondence

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     (e.g., the king is in his kingdom, the lion among the animals, the eagle among birds, and so forth). From these theories the idea emerges that disorders in the human realm will resonate in nature, because the very order of things is threatened.⁷⁸

This earlier social imaginary, grounded in the analogical power of the Forms or ideas throughout the social and moral order, is contrasted by Taylor with his summary account of our modern social imaginary, grounded instead in each individual finding themselves in a state of nature and constructing pragmatic agreements with other individuals in order to secure their life, liberty, and property. There is no background metaphysical and social role for the divine ideas. Everything is predicated on the social constructions of individual human beings. Whether our present-day social imaginary might again grow porous to any transcendent reality beyond the immanent frame of our own human construction remains to be seen. The old maxim that the ill use of something does not take away its proper use could perhaps suggest that Christian theology itself might find it possible to retrieve what was helpful in the role of the divine ideas as a mode of reflection about the goodness of creation. And the final chapters of this book will indeed offer some suggestions in that direction. But none of that would be possible unless theology reckons with the impact upon the divine ideas of their profound immersion and conversion in the dying and rising of Christ. And this is what we turn to in Chapter 3.

Notes 1. Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 160, 162. 2. Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” 168. 3. Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” 169–70. 4. Augustine, City of God, XI.10, trans. Gerald G. Walsh et al., ed. Vernon J. Bourke (New York: Image Books, 1958), 196. 5. Bernard McGinn, “Platonic and Christian: The Case of the Divine Ideas,” in Of Scholars, Savants, and their Texts: Studies in Philosophy and Religious Thought, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 163–172, 168. 6. Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 10, 24. 7. ST Ia Q. 18 a. 4.

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8. ST Ia Q. 44 a. 3. 9. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Reynolds Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), 51–52. 10. ST Ia Q. 8 a. 1. 11. Origen, On First Principles, I.2–3, trans. G. W. Butterworth (London: SPCK, 1936; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 16. 12. Origen, On First Principles, I.3–4, 16–17. 13. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel according to John Books 1–10, Book I, §92, trans. Ronald E. Heine, The Fathers of the Church series (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 52. 14. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel, I.119, 58. 15. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel, I.114–15, 57. 16. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, ed. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), I.3, 6. 17. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 1–10, Tractate 1.17.1, trans. John W. Rettig, The Fathers of the Church series (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 56. References to this text are hereafter given parenthetically. 18. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, II.7, 14. 19. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, II.7, 13. 20. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, II.7, 13–14. 21. Zachary Hayes, “Incarnation and Creation in the Theology of St. Bonaventure,” in Studies Honoring Ignatius Brady, Friar Minor, ed. Romano Stephen Almagno OFM and Conrad L. Harkins, OFM (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1976), 309–330 (322). 22. Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 263. 23. Origen, The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers vol. 26 (Westminster, MD: Paulist Press, 1957), 29–30. 24. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 55, 1080A. 25. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, 52, 1076C. 26. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, 55, 1076B. 27. Cf. Joshua Lollar, To See into the Life of Things: The Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor and His Predecessors (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 249. 28. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (trans.), Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), n. 16 on 328. 29. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on John para. 10–12, in The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, 125–126.

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30. Bonaventure, Collations on the Six Days, XII.5, trans. José de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970), 174–175. 31. For more on this, see Wendy Peterson Boring, “Bonaventure’s ‘Doctrine of Illumination’: An Artifact of Modernity,” in Dreams and Visions, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Leiden: Brill, 2009(, 137–166. 32. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth, IV.6, answer to difficulty 5, in Truth, Vol. I, trans. Robert W. Mulligan, SJ (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 195. 33. For these changes see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), throughout; e.g., “Forms ceased to be the ontological backbone of the world and the sole instruments for its cognition . . . . After Ockham and largely due to his influence, epistemological discussions shifted ground from an assimilatory to a causal account of cognition: the act of cognition ceased to be seen as an identity with or a becoming one of the forms of things with the intellect” (309). Still helpful is Gordon Leff, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on the Intellectual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), see esp. chapter 2 “Knowledge and Belief.” 34. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1998), 139. As quoted in Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 35. Saler, As If, n.28, p. 207; Sara Lyons, “The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater,” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (October 2014): 873–895. 36. Lyons, “The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World,” 880. 37. Lyons, “The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World,” 879–880. 38. Lyons, “The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World,” 880. 39. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 149. 40. Mark Edmonson, Nightmare on Mainstreet: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 41. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 20. See also Nelson’s more recent Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 42. From the standpoint of the history of science, see the now definitive works of Laurence M. Principe, e.g., The Scientific Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Margaret J. Osler, Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and Rob Iliffe, Priest of

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43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

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Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); in terms of intra-disciplinary debates that have often meant a studied inattention to religious aspects of important cultural developments, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and in terms of popular culture see the fascinating work of Jeffrey Kripal, who in a number of volumes has explored the displacement of the religious supernatural dimensions of human experience into contemporary “scientific” interests in the paranormal (e.g., Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015]). For helpful background and current debates, see Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and After the Condemnation of 1277: Philosophy and Theology at the University of Paris in the Last Quarter of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery, Jr., and Andreas Speer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001). Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 347. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 347. Stephen A. McKnight, The Modern Age and the Recovery of Ancient Wisdom: A Reconsideration of Historical Consciousness, 1450–1650 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 21. Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 30. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 31. Emphasis original. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and John O’Meara (Montreal: Editions Bellarmin, 1987), Book II, 545B, 145. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 36. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 38. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 38. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 39. Further on Ockham’s concern about universal archetypes and divine freedom, see Armand Maurer, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of its Principles (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1999), 226. For a clear recent account of the absolute and ordained power of God in Ockham see Rik Van Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially 256–263. Louis Dupré, “The Dissolution of the Union of Nature and Grace at the Dawn of the Modern Age,” chapter 3 in The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg: Twelve American Critiques, with and Autobiographical Essay and Response, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Philip Clayton (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1988), 95–121 (102).

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56. Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 75. 57. Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 20. 58. David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 152 and 155; quoted in Watson, Back to Nature, 17. 59. Marsilio Ficino, “The Book ‘On Obtaining Life from the Heavens’ by Marsilio Ficino of Florence, Which He Composed among His Commentaries on Plotinus,” Book III, in Three Books on Life, trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance Society of America, 2002), III.1, p. 243. 60. Brian Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 60. 61. Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture, 60. 62. Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture, 58. 63. John Baptista Porta, Natural Magick (London 1658), I.6, p. 7. 64. See Ryan J. Stark, Rhetoric, Science and Magic in Seventeenth Century England (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), especially chapter 1, “Charmed and Plain Tropes.” 65. Porta, Natural Magick, I.6, p. 8. 66. See György E. Szőnyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2004), 186. 67. Watson, Back to Nature, 14. 68. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning I, in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 and 2002), 123. 69. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning II, 196. 70. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I.23, in Novum Organum; with Other Parts of the Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 49. 71. Watson, Back to Nature, 23. 72. James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine Volume 1: Ficino to Descartes (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 21. 73. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 192–193. 74. Watson, Back to Nature, 50. 75. Louis Dupré, “The Broken Mirror: The Fragmentation of the Symbolic World,” Stanford Literature Review 5 (Spring–Fall 1988): 7–24 (8). 76. Rhodri Lewis, Artificial Languages in England: From Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 140. 77. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 91. 78. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 94.

3 The Saving Word of All Things The Incarnate Word as Bearer of Creation’s Truth

In the first half of this book I’ve sought to demonstrate how profoundly the Trinitarian matrix of the divine ideas informs not only a proper understanding of the divine ideas tradition itself but also how that tradition, thus understood in Trinitarian terms, informs Christian understandings of the created order as a whole. And yet as we saw at the end of the last chapter, any renewal of this vision of the good creation in the light of the divine ideas would require us to refresh our understanding of how the ideas are transformed by the mystery of salvation. Christians have believed that in Christ they encounter the deep truth of themselves and all things, a truth which is converting, healing, and re-creative. I believe that this perception has, over many centuries, informed Christian understandings of the divine ideas, imbuing them with a Christological vitality and agency. For in Christ the ideas are no longer simply immutable eternal principles, arousing the philosophically adept by their beauty; they have been rediscovered as the living thoughts of God, elements in the vivacious self-communication of the Trinity, and therefore savingly present in Christ. In the final book of Augustine’s On the Trinity, the bishop highlights the infinite Trinitarian self-sharing within which the ideas exist: So the Father knows all things in himself, knows them in the Son; but in himself as knowing himself, in the Son as knowing his Word which is about all these things that are in himself. Likewise the Son too knows all things that are in himself, that is to say as things that are born from the things that the Father knows in himself, and he knows them in the Father as the things from which are born all the things that he as Son knows in himself . . . . And all the things that are in their knowledge, in their wisdom, in their being, each of them sees all at once.¹

In Augustine’s view, the ideas are born from this inexhaustible mutual knowing and imaging; they “take place” in the very depths of the divine The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology. Mark A. McIntosh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Mark A. McIntosh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.003.0004

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Persons’ eternal understanding, alive with the relational beholding of Father and Son. Perhaps Augustine evokes here something of the wonder and illimitable possibility that Jesus’ followers sensed in his mysterious words that “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27). Being drawn by the Holy Spirit into this unimaginably fruitful mutuality of Christ and the one he calls Father, Christians in Augustine’s view are graced with some glimmer of the radiant flowing of all things from the mutual knowing and loving of God. Perhaps as well we sense here something of the contemplative joy of early followers of Jesus, being drawn to consider the beauty and power of Christ as he searches the heart of the One who sent him, in order to realize on earth the cherishable truth of all creatures as they are in the heaven of God’s own life. These things known “in their knowledge, in their wisdom, in their being” are brought to expression in time through the Word’s continual calling of them into creaturely existence, bearing witness by creation and re-creation to the Father’s primordial meaning. Thus, I believe, far from being an ages-long puzzle over epistemological and metaphysical problems inflicted upon Christian doctrine by an unhealthy brush with Hellenistic thought, the divine ideas tradition in Christianity is a Christologically-revolutionized teaching about the relationship of all creatures to God in the Word. I have argued elsewhere that Christian theology really begins as Jesus’ followers attempted to understand what was happening to themselves and to all creation as a result of his life, death and resurrection, and outpouring of the Spirit.² I’m suggesting now that Christians’ experience of being drawn into Christ’s relationship with the Father instilled into the developing notion of the divine ideas something of that immense generosity and self-giving that reached into the world in the incarnate Word, and that Christians came to contemplate through their participation in the Trinitarian life. So I want to take the next step in elucidating the properly theological significance of the ideas by showing the rootedness of the tradition in the fundamental field of soteriology. We might formulate the basic question addressed here as follows. Christians believe that in the eternal begetting of the Word, the Father not only fully knows and expresses the divine life, but all the rich variety of ways in which the creatures will come to participate in the gift of existence; so what would it mean if this Word, in whom all creatures are eternally known by God, becomes incarnate, is crucified, and raised from the dead? To anticipate, we have the lapidary formulation of Aquinas, explaining that the creative

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conceiving of all things in God is one with the Father’s eternal begetting of the Word: “Since God by understanding Himself understands all other things . . . the Word conceived in God by His understanding of Himself must also be the Word of all things.”³ But if the “Word of all things,” the deep truth and creative authorial meaning for every creature, is also the Word incarnate who dies and is alive, how might this fact illuminate our understanding of the mystery of salvation? As we have seen in earlier chapters, the divine ideas doctrine enables theology to work at such a question with a sense of the cosmological, indeed even the ecological, dimensions fully in view, but also with existential questions about the calling and destiny of human agents equally under consideration. This, in a sense, is one of the key benefits of the divine ideas doctrine, that it helps to avoid compartmentalizing tendencies in theology—it holds the cosmic and the personal, the systemic and the individual together. My point in this chapter is thus to suggest how profoundly the divine ideas teaching is at work as Christians have sought to understand their belief in the saving missions of the Word incarnate and the Spirit poured out through Christ.

Trinitarian Joy as the Ground and Goal of Salvation If my hunch is correct about the developing understanding of insights such as Augustine’s just above, then I think it would be right to conceive of Christians looking through the events of salvation into the mystery of the Trinity from which they flow. In other words, the saving love manifest, Christians believe, in the self-giving of Christ and outpouring of the Spirit are the rescuing and re-creative expressions in time of God’s infinite knowing and loving of the creatures in eternity. In fact, I believe, the divine ideas tradition assisted Christians over many centuries to ponder and appreciate more deeply the true source and end of the whole economy of creation and salvation—as the reflection in finite time and space of the infinite knowing and loving of God, and of God’s delight in all the possibilities by which this divine joy might be shared. Creation comes into being, in other words, in order that all creaturely expressions of God’s knowing and loving might be drawn to participate to the highest possible degree in God’s joy and fullness of life. Aquinas emphasizes that both love and joy are found properly in God, not as passions such as we might undergo but rather as divine perfections that initiate and consummate all things: “love in the manner of a moving principle and joy in the manner of an end.”⁴ For Thomas, it is the

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very life of the Trinity itself that causes all creatures to flow forth into time and space as a result of God’s love, and leads them to participate in God because of God’s own joy, a joy which includes God’s joy in them. The divine ideas teaching allows us to see more clearly the logic of Thomas’ position regarding the Trinitarian ground and goal of creation; for it is precisely because the creatures-to-be exist in God’s eternal knowing of Godself and are loved in God’s eternal loving of Godself that God expresses them in time and space so that they may freely choose God’s joy as their consummation: Effects proceed from the agent that causes them, in so far as they pre-exist in the agent; since every agent produces its like. Now effects pre-exist in their cause after the mode of the cause. Wherefore since the Divine Being is His own intellect, effects pre-exist in Him after the mode of intellect, and therefore proceed from Him after the same mode. Consequently, they proceed from Him after the mode of will, for His inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to the will. Therefore the will of God is the cause of things.⁵

As Thomas observes, whatever God causes preexists within God, and since God is intellectual existence itself the causes preexist in the mode of intellect, i.e., as divine ideas; and the fact that these causes come to be realized as effects in time, as creatures, is because of God’s will, God’s love, desiring “to put in act what His intellect has conceived.” Thus the eternal understanding and loving of God includes God’s understanding and loving of all the ways in which the divine life might be enjoyed, and it is for the sake of sharing this ultimate enjoyment with all beings, suggests Thomas, that creation and salvation come to pass: “He went forth out of love for his goodness in such a manner that he wished to diffuse his goodness and communicate it to others, in so far as possible, namely by way of similitude, so that this goodness would not remain in him alone but would flow forth to others.”⁶ In speaking of God coming “forth out of love for his goodness,” Thomas is drawing on the influential writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, the name we use for the anonymous fifth- to sixth-century Syrian monk, who suggests in a most arresting and beautiful way how God’s knowing and loving of Godself (including of course the divine ideas of all creatures) leads to the whole economy of time and finite existence—as the overflowing and generous love of God. And indeed we can see how important a source Dionysius was for Thomas. As Eric Perl observes:

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God knows all things, not by any mode of cognition correlated and directed to beings, but in knowing himself as their cause. ‘For the divine mind knows, not learning beings from beings, but it pre-contains and pregathers the vision and knowledge . . . and being of all things from itself and in itself, as cause . . . in one encompassment of the cause knowing and comprehending all things.’⁷

For Dionysius “those principles which preexist as a unity in God and which produce the essences of things” are nothing less than the unitary expression of God’s beauty and goodness—which will find differentiated finite expressions when reflected into time.⁸ Dionysius argues that this eternal wisdom, God’s own super-existence as the unity of all beings yet to be, is embraced in the eternal motion of God’s knowing and loving. As we consider a most famous passage, notice how Dionysius evokes the ecstatic dynamism of the divine life, and grounds the procession of creatures precisely within this divine delight: the very cause of the universe in the beautiful, good superabundance of his benign yearning for all is also carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything. He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself . . . . In short, both the yearning and the object of that yearning belong to the Beautiful and the Good. They preexist in it, and because of it they exist and come to be.⁹

The Trinity, as the inexhaustible act of knowing and loving God’s own infinite goodness, is infinitely self-donating; and for this reason all that exists eternally within God comes to be in time as God’s differentiated, finite expression of the divine beauty and goodness—an act in which God proceeds and is present within all finite beings while at the same time, in virtue of being the Trinity who exists by infinite self-donation, simultaneously remains within Godself, eternally fulfilled. God is immanent as the very ground of all things for the very reason that God is transcendent to all things—not one of them alongside or in competition with them, but expressing Godself within all of them as their cause; or to put it another way, God is all the more Godself as the superabundant self-giving ground of all because God is God precisely by giving Godself away in love and delight.

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In fact I believe the divine ideas teaching is the implicit rationale for this argument in Dionysius: when he says in the quotation just above that “both the yearning and the object of that yearning belong to the Beautiful and the Good,” he means that the divine ideas of all creatures existing eternally within God’s self-knowing and self-loving are the very object of the divine yearning that draws God ecstatically into eternal self-giving. Thus the creatures, as they come to exist in time, are always the object of the divine love, of which the saving acts of the incarnate Word are the expression within time of that infinite eternal divine knowing and loving. What we have been exploring in Dionysius and in Thomas, I am arguing, is a mode of theological reflection (facilitated by the divine ideas tradition) that allows Christians to sense the act of God in Christ to rescue them as in fact grounded in an eternal loving of them within the very life of God. This Dionysian insight permeated important strands in Christian thought for centuries. It highlighted the notion of God being moved in goodness and joy and the creature as the intended recipient of that divine life. It found a particularly brilliant expression in Catherine of Siena, who encouraged her correspondents to ponder their eternal presence to God: “We discover with what blazing love God’s goodness is established within us, because we see that he loved us within himself before he created us”; moreover she intensifies within believers’ present experience a transformative awareness of their eternal desirability to God: “Love, then, love! Ponder the fact that you were loved before you ever loved. For God looked within himself and fell in love with the beauty of his creature and so created us. He was moved by the fire of his ineffable charity to one purpose only: that we should have eternal life and enjoy the infinite good God was enjoying in himself.”¹⁰ For Catherine the divine ideas are not only the exemplars that account for a person’s existence in time, they are also, the more one meditates upon them, the living pledges of God’s deep delight in one, of God’s eternal intention to share unstintingly the fullness of God’s own life. With the acute insight of a true spiritual doctor, Catherine even asks her correspondents, in the midst of their earthly trials, to consider that no matter what may befall them the deep truth of their being is that they are eternally God’s beloved. The eternal divine knowing and loving, the inexhaustible understanding and delight of the Trinity, grounds the flowing forth into finite existence by which divine ideas reflect themselves in time and space. And as we have just noted in the case of Catherine of Siena, the recognition of one’s identity as thus grounded in the eternal life of the Trinity transfigures and reorients the spiritual journey of the human person. I want further to suggest that for the

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divine ideas tradition the inner meaning and purpose of creation as a whole is the incarnation of the Word—the full and consummate expression of the divine knowing and loving within the microcosm of the creation that is the human person. Bernard McGinn argues, for example, that Meister Eckhart echoes “the pan-Christic ontology of Maximus the Confessor and others, who saw the Incarnation, the hominification of God, as the very purpose and inner reality of creation itself.”¹¹ The fact that this full expression of the divine truth and meaning takes the form in our world of a self-giving death on the cross, a saving and redeeming action of love, is not a sign that God requires human suffering or sacrifice in order to bring creation to fulfillment, but rather a sign of the kind of world we have made—in which the fullest expression of divine meaning and love is forced to accomplish itself within the constraints of human fear, antagonism, and violence. Nonetheless, I have been arguing, the divine ideas tradition illuminates the flowing forth of all creatures and their salvific return in Christ through the Spirit as motivated by the inexhaustible goodness and joy of God.

The Authoring Truth of All Creatures in the Word So far I have been pointing to ways in which the divine ideas teaching allows Christian theology to consider very directly the Trinitarian ground of salvation. Before turning to the work of salvation itself, it will be helpful to notice ways in which the divine ideas teaching particularly highlights the salvific significance of the fact that the incarnate Word bears within himself the fundamental truth of all creatures. In this section, then, I want to pick out three particular aspects of this salvific significance of the truth-bearing Word: first, there is the sheer vivacity and re-creative capacity of the eternal ideas in the Word, their power as the Word’s authority to renovate every creature; second, there is the Word’s illuminating power to awaken within rational creatures a deeper level of consciousness, a growing awareness of the meaning of all things, including their own lives when considered within God’s knowing and loving of them; and third, there is the sense in which the blossoming of this new and deeper consciousness of oneself radically intensifies, disclosing the working of Christ’s dying and rising within the individual—releasing one from an isolated, finite, and perhaps damaged sense of self, and bringing to life a new unity with one’s divinely known and beloved identity in the Word. Again we are reminded how the divine ideas teaching links together the full range of Christian beliefs, always acting

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as an index of the divine intent to create, sustain, rescue, and bring to fulfillment all that exists. The integration, for example, of the doctrines of the Trinity and creation with Christology and soteriology is nicely evident in this text from John Scotus Eriugena (c.800–c.877): Before this visible world proceeded through generation into the genera and species and all the sensible individuals, God the Father, before the secular ages, brought forth His Word, in Whom and through Whom He created in their full perfection the primordial causes of all natures, which, under the administration of Divine Providence, in a wonderful harmony, in their natural course bring to perfection . . . this visible world from the start at which it begins to be to the finish at which it ceases to be.¹²

It is worth pondering here already the many implications of Eriugena’s fundamental point: the primordial causes of all things, by which God with providential care brings each creature to its consummation—these very causes, which are the living truth of God’s deep desire for every being’s fulfillment, exist in their full plenitude and unvanquished reality in the Word of God. For much of the tradition, this understanding of the Word’s re-creative capacity finds expression in a consistent reading of the Prologue to John’s Gospel. Exponents of the divine ideas tradition read the text “what has come into being in him was life” (1:3–4) as precisely referring to the eternal and unquenchably living reality of God’s ideas of the creatures-to-be; it is this power of life that can not only create but re-recreate all creatures. Augustine commenting on the Prologue writes: Because the Wisdom of God, through which all things were made, contains all things in accordance with his creative knowledge before he constructs all things, it follows that whatever things are made through this creative knowledge are not immediately life; but whatever has been made is life in him. You see the earth; there exists an earth in his creative knowledge. You see the sky; there exists a sky in his creative knowledge. You see the sun and the moon; these, too, exist in his creative knowledge. But externally they are bodies; in his creative knowledge they are life.¹³

Besides encouraging his hearers to follow the beauty of sensible reality into its mysterious fullness and depth within God, Augustine here contrasts the finite and vulnerable embodied state of the creatures with the vibrant

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authoring artistry in which they exist as God’s ideas: “whatever has been made is life in him,” that is, the creatures have an imperishable life within the Word that no earthly limits or sorrows can overcome. Augustine had admonished his listeners: “You have already been made through the Word, but you need to be made anew through the Word . . . . But how would he re-create you through the Word if you should have the wrong sense of the Word?”¹⁴ In order to have a better sense of the Word, Augustine suggests, one needs to understand the Word as bearer within himself of the authoring truth of all things: Men look at a fine building and admire the design of the builder; they are amazed at what they see and delight in what they do not see, for who is there who can see a design? So, if human design is praised because of some great building, do you wish to see what a design of God is the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the Word of God? Look at the structure of the universe: see what was made by the Word and then you will recognize what the nature of the Word is. Look at these two bodies of the world, the sky and the earth. Who can describe in words the splendor of the sky? Who can describe in words the abundance of the earth? Who can adequately praise the variation of the seasons?¹⁵

Augustine evokes our wonder at the earth’s beauty in order to draw our spiritual attention towards the Word who is the perfect expression of all that God is and in whom dwell the imperishable designs for all that comes to be in time and space. It’s worthwhile noting here the intertwining of the first two aspects (which I mentioned at the beginning of this section) of the salvific significance of the divine ideas in the Word: not only is the Word the bearer of the eternal, authoring, and hence re-creative truth of all things, but as the one through whom all rational creatures encounter this blessed intelligibility, the Word also engenders the awakening of creatures to ever fuller consciousness, to contemplative participation in the eternal divine self-knowing and self-loving. Thus Augustine’s view is that the divine ideas or reasons in the Word are the productive, veracious ground of the created universe’s intelligibility. We could also say that they are the loom upon which all creaturely thought is woven, for any act of intelligence is a response of mind to this deep truth in which all things consist and come to be. And thus discipleship in Christ would be linked to a vision of creation’s truth and value. Augustine argues that seeing the truth of all things in Christ relates integrally to the life of

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caritas: “to the extent that [the soul] clings to him in charity it is to a certain degree filled and lit by him with intelligible light and discerns . . . those reasons whose vision produces supreme blessedness.”¹⁶ The Word’s incarnate presence brings blessedness, redemption, precisely because the Word bears within himself the true life of every creature in all its fresh, divinelyminted vivacity. To encounter this living truth is blessedness, says Augustine; to be united with him is new creation. In his own homily on John’s prologue, Eriugena stresses the role of the Word as the life of creation in at least two emphatic ways. It is the Father’s continual speaking of the truth of every creature in the Word that sustains the universe in existence moment by moment: If the heavenly Father ceased to speak his Word, the effect of the Word, that is, the created universe, would not subsist. For the speaking of the Father, that is, the eternal and unchangeable generation of his Word, is the subsistence and permanence of the created universe.¹⁷

Moreover for Eriugena the eternal speaking of the Word is the subsistence of the universe precisely because within the eternal generation of the Word are the living archetypes according to which the universe expresses God’s meaning and love: All things therefore, that have been made through the Word live in him unchangeably and are life . . . beyond all time and place they all are one in him and subsist universally, visible things and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, rational and irrational . . . . And the things that seem to us to be devoid of all vital motion live in the Word.¹⁸

Eriugena helps us to see how powerfully the divine ideas tradition informed Christian faith in the power of God in Christ to bring life to all things—for all things are the manifestation of their divine life in the Word. And this grounds the power and authority of the Word to restore the life of all creatures. For all that God expresses in time reflects the divine essence, considered in terms of God’s self-understanding: the ideas, majestically and imperishably alive with the fullness of life itself. Eriugena highlights the fact that even what seems to us to be “devoid of all vital motion” enjoys the plenitude of divine vivacity. We should also note that Eriugena points out the unity and oneness of all things in the Word, existing in communion and without the divisions that shatter the good creation. This is particularly

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significant because, as we will see in the case of Hadewijch below, an element of the salvific authority of Christ the Word incarnate is his role in restoring to human consciousness, distorted by fear and suffering, a renewed sense of the oneness and solidarity among creatures considered from the vantage point of their ground in God. Anselm of Canterbury illustrates this same theme in the Monologion. Asking his monks to consider the relative reality of the creatures and the Word in whom and through whom they exist, Anselm cleverly coaxes out into the open the likely misapprehension at work in their thinking. We’re used to the way ideas of things we’ve seen in the world exist in our minds as a kind of imitation of those things, but, he asks, “What about the Word which says everything and through which everything was made?” Surely we don’t think that the truth of things in the Word by whom they are spoken into existence is only a kind of imitation of a passing, mutable reality, for then the Word would not be “consubstantial with supreme immutability,” and that is not true. But neither do we want to say that the Word doesn’t contain the truth of things, for then the “Word of the supreme truth” wouldn’t be altogether true, “which is absurd.” Anselm then leads his students out of the puzzle by suggesting the example of a living human being, and the painting that is his or her likeness: The truth of a human being is said to exist in a living human being, whereas in a painted depiction there is the likeness or image of that truth. In the same way, the truth of existing beings is understood to be in the Word, whose essence exists so supremely that in a certain sense it alone exists; whereas in the things that (by comparison with him) in a certain sense do not exist, and yet have been made through him and in accordance with him, there is judged to be an imitation of that supreme essence.¹⁹ Thus Anselm wants us to recognize that our habitual experience—we see and know things because they are—needs to be reversed in order for analogical reasoning in theology to work: things are only because God knows them; i.e., it is not that the Word, the eternal knowing of God, reflects the things that are, but rather that they come to be and are reflections in time only in virtue of the fact that God knows Godself eternally—and all things as aspects or ideas within that divine selfunderstanding. Anselm’s position highlights a couple of points that are particularly helpful to bear in mind. The first is simply that, as fallen creatures, we do tend nearly incorrigibly (and often without realizing it) to make our own present experience of existence the norm or measure of existence per se. Hence Anselm asks us to consider that what we think of as ourselves is more

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like a portrait or image painted onto the canvass of time, reflecting the archetype in whose image we exist. The Renaissance theologian and philosopher Marsilio Ficino captures this tendency of ours very well in his advice to a friend who feels uncertain about his course in life: Seek yourself beyond the world . . . . You believe yourself to be in the abyss of this world simply because you do not discern yourself flying above the heavens, but see your shadow, the body, in the abyss. It is as if a boy leaning over a well were to imagine himself at the bottom, although it is only his shadow he sees reflected there, until he turns back to himself.²⁰

Mesmerized by our shadow-image in time, we find it hard to recall and recognize the true and vibrant reality of our identity and calling as that which is always present in the divine knowing and loving of the Trinity. Or, put another way: “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”²¹ Throughout the Pauline literature, we see this common assertion, that the self we have been led by sin into accepting—asserting it against others and suffering self-undoing through its idolatries—is the self that, in our baptism, has died with Christ. It is a self shaped by our mortal life, by our biology and our culture and by all the vitiations that sin has inflicted so stuntingly upon this self—the most fundamental of which being our hypnotic belief that it is really and exclusively the whole truth of who we are. The divine ideas tradition helps us to see how and why the world’s mendacious grip on our identity, undone in Christ’s death, could never have been the authoritative truth of us, which flows exclusively through the lifegiving self-sharing of the Trinity. We think of our present life as what’s real, says Anselm, and desperately so; but our mortal life is more like the existence of an artwork in comparison to the real existence of the original model. Our mortal life exists as an analog of that imperishable life by which our personhood may be re-created. Sharing a similar pattern of thought with both Augustine and Eriugena, Anselm suggests that the full plenitude and truth of the creatures exists in the Word, and so, not surprisingly, the Word incarnate has unmatched authority and a compelling power to understand and restore the creatures. In more epistemological terms, Bonaventure portrays the unveiling of this deep truth of the creature in the Word incarnate as the work of Christ the interior teacher:

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While things have being in themselves, they also have being in the mind [of creatures] and in the eternal reason [of God] as well. They are not entirely immutable in the first and second modes of being, but only in the third; namely, in as far as they are in the eternal Word. It follows, therefore, that nothing can render things perfectly knowable unless Christ is present, the Son of God and the Teacher.²²

The truth of things, says Bonaventure, is indeed present in the things themselves and as our human mind grasps them in thought, but these finite expressions of truth are subject to all the harms and mendacities of our fallen world; and therefore it is the radiant truth of things as God eternally knows and loves them in the Word that can most fully liberate our own understanding of the world around us and of ourselves. I would argue, then, that the divine ideas are an implicit aspect of the Christian belief in the revelatory (and redemptive) power of Christ the Word incarnate. In his commentary on John’s prologue, Meister Eckhart equally emphasizes the power of the Word as the bearer of the life-giving reality of all beings, able to sustain and re-create them according to their eternal idea. In fact, as Bernard McGinn notes, “Eckhart frequently moves back and forth between a discussion of the ideas of things to a discussion of their archetypal Idea, that is the Word or Logos, in order to show the isomorphic relation between the two.”²³ We might put it this way: the Word includes the unity of all the ways in which God’s knowing of Godself might be imitated by creatures, and the exemplar ideas according to which the creatures do imitate God’s essence are the differentiated, unfolded, manifestation of the Word. As such these ideas in the Idea are the sustaining and light-bearing realities for all finite beings. The Word, Logos, or idea of things exists in such a way and completely in each of them that it nevertheless exists entirely outside each. It is entirely within and entirely without. This is evident in living creatures, both in any species and in any particular example of the species. For this reason when things are moved, changed or destroyed, their entire idea remains immobile and intact . . . . The idea then is “the light in the darkness” of created beings.²⁴

Eckhart powerfully evokes the crucial Christian insight of the divine transcendence and immanence, assuring his readers of this healing and renewing presence, as of light that darkness cannot overcome: the divine truth of every

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creature, radiant within God’s eternal knowing of it, is also present and unvanquished in every creature’s core, no matter what earthly travail the creature may suffer or the world teach it to believe about itself. Indeed one could say that for Eckhart it is precisely because Christ is the idea-bearer that he is the light in the darkness which darkness cannot overcome. For almost all of the thinkers we have discussed in this book, thinkers broadly in the Christian Platonist tradition, all finite existence reflects in time and space the infinite consciousness that is God’s eternal self-knowing and self-loving. All creatures are in this sense most fully themselves as they awaken to the fullest level of consciousness that their form of being can express—since divine consciousness is in fact the continuously flowing ground of their existence in time. And as we have seen, our thinkers understand this liberation of consciousness to be a renewing conversion or likening to the source of creatures’ existence, their eternally living, empowered, and cherished identity in God’s knowing of them. For this very reason, one crucial marker of the truth-bearing power of the incarnate Word is Christ’s authority to draw others into the illuminating recovery of their true identity in fellowship with himself. Maximus the Confessor becomes a particularly important witness in this regard, importantly deepening the Christological element in his transmission of the influential writings of Dionysius. For Maximus, the logos or idea of every human person dwells radiantly in Christ, guiding the spiritual journey of each person. Maximus understands Christ as drawing each person, through discipleship and a life of faith, towards ever closer assimilation to the idea or logos of oneself in Christ. For Maximus this is a movement of homecoming, fulfillment, or actualization of the human person’s potential.²⁵ We could perhaps say that through the encounter with Christ, Christians believe, they are enabled to rediscover the truth of their image and likeness to God, the truth of their own personhood: “God’s loving will, or logoi, for each creature is reflected in the latter’s analogia, i.e., as the intended reflection of the divine the creature strives ever to become what, in a sense, it is already in God.”²⁶ What would this rediscovery of one’s true self in Christ be like—how have Christians represented it? Meister Eckhart speaks of this awakening consciousness as “the now of eternity, in which the soul knows all things in God new and fresh and present and joyous as I have them now present.”²⁷ And as McGinn comments, the saving significance of this knowledge of things in God includes the rediscovery of one’s own self: “For Eckhart, grace saves primarily insofar as it activates the intellect to become aware of itself as imago dei.”²⁸ Thus grace actualizes an intensified form of consciousness, and

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for Eckhart this means a consciousness gradually set free from whatever impedes an awareness of oneness or groundedness within God’s own act of self-knowing. McGinn notes that for Eckhart the soul can only break through to her ground in God by a “loss of all possessiveness” and this breakthrough leads also to a “realization of the birth” of the Word in the soul.²⁹ We could perhaps understand the possessiveness that Eckhart warns about as a form of consciousness fixed upon desires, actions, or objects that reinforce or legitimize a sense of self that is divided from others and from God; whereas by contrast the realization of the birth of the Word in the soul means, for Eckhart, the gift or breaking through of a new form of consciousness in which one’s identity as a word in the Word, as the true event of God’s own self-knowing and loving, becomes radiant and real—a new form of consciousness that flows from and is one’s abiding unity with all being in God. We can see how Eckhart interprets this breakthrough of consciousness— becoming one with one’s true identity within God’s own Beloved—in his suggestion that this is in fact the goal of the Incarnation itself: Why did God become man? So that I might be born the same. God died so that I might die to the whole world and to all created things. This is how one should understand our Lord’s words: “Everything that I have heard from my Father I have revealed to you.” What does the Son hear from his Father? The Father can do nothing but give birth; the Son can do nothing but be born. All that the Father has and is, the abyss of the divine being and divine nature, all this he brings forth completely in his only-begotten Son. What the Son hears from the Father he has revealed to us: that we are this same Son. All that the Son has he has from his Father: being and nature, so that we might be this same only-begotten Son.³⁰

In the Father’s giving birth to the Son he eternally brings forth the entire “abyss of the divine being,” as Eckhart puts it. And as we have seen, in the divine ideas tradition this bringing forth includes the exemplar forms of all creatures as God’s own knowing of Godself in the Son or Word; what the presence of the incarnate Word makes possible, suggests Eckhart, is the recognition of our own identity in the Word, “that we are this same Son.” As with Maximus, the grace of deepening awareness of Christ and fidelity to him leads the soul, in Eckhart’s view, to a new level of consciousness in which the self, as determined and perhaps damaged by this world, is awakened by Christ and renewed through its divine idea, renewed in its identity in unity with the Word made flesh.

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Few Christian teachers prior to Eckhart developed this theme more profoundly than the remarkable Beguine poet and spiritual leader Hadewijch; indeed scholars continue to ponder the possible influence of Hadewijch upon Eckhart. As Barbara Newman explains: A good Christian Platonist, Hadewijch believed firmly in exemplarism, the doctrine of all creatures’ real and eternal existence in the mind of God. Thus she took comfort in the thought that although her earthly, empirical self might still be immature and far from union, her eternal self was already glorified in the beatitude of perfect love.³¹

Newman explores in insightful detail Hadewijch’s Vision Four, in which Christ as the bridegroom makes possible a transposition in consciousness: Hadewijch’s locus of identity converts from her earthly self to her archetypal self in God. Her encounters with Christ “entail a shock of recognition wherein Hadewijch realizes that ‘I’ am ‘She’; a collapse of temporality, wherein the present self as experiencing subject meets the once and future self as ideal object.”³² It is precisely Christ’s conversation with both Hadewijch’s earthly and archetypal self that enables a reconciliation of her earthly to her archetypal self—as God has always known and loved her. Through her confidence in Christ as her lover, she awakens to her archetypal self and is set free to relinquish her earthly subjectivity—assured now that this earthly empirical self will find herself in Christ. Jesus addresses her, simultaneously calling forth and affirming her archetypal self in God, precisely by releasing her from anxieties about the future of her earthly self: And she shall become full-grown today and come tomorrow with you into her kingdom; and nevertheless shall remain equal with me. You have wished, dear strong heroine and lady . . . that she should attain full-growth so as to be like me, so that I should be like her and you like myself.³³

Hadewijch dramatizes for her readers this compelling power of the archetypal self, as mediated through Christ, to draw the earthly self towards its true consummation. Louis Bouyer notes that for Hadewijch we are all like so many logoi within the unique Logos and inseparable from him: from this expressed thought of the Father in which, from all eternity, thinking in himself, he thinks all that will ever be. It is thus that we are, all of us and each one of us, to recognize ourselves as eternally conceived, loved, willed

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such as we are to become in our concrete existence, through the Father in his Son.³⁴

In Letter 19 Hadewijch implores one of her correspondents to think of her archetypal self in God, of its consummate joy, and thereby to be drawn and guided by that self existing eternally in the Word: Oh, may you grow according to that dignity which is yours and for which you were destined before time began! How can you endure it that God enjoys you in his essence, and you did not have enjoyment of him?³⁵

We can note here the important theme of divine delight, the joy of God in the divine goodness—in which all creatures participate eternally through their exemplar forms in the Word. Hadewijch discerningly employs this to encourage her correspondent and to arouse within her a reciprocal desire to share in the eternal delight. Bouyer suggests that for Hadewijch, Christ as the bearer within our world of our true selves enables this awakening: “the incarnate Word, as he includes us in himself ideally from all eternity, allows us through and in his Incarnation to become in ourselves, in time, what we were eternally in his divinity.”³⁶ If one index of an adequate soteriology is its ability to disclose the ongoing personal existential impact of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, it seems fair to say that exponents of the divine ideas teaching had at their disposal a significant tool for articulating just such lifegiving forms of soteriology. The creative theological insights of mystical thinkers such as Hadewijch and Eckhart make powerfully evident the Christological focus of the divine ideas teaching as it developed over the course of Christian history. I believe this was possible, as I have suggested, because the divine ideas tradition encouraged Christian thinkers to hold together the historical economy of salvation with the ineffable mystery of God’s eternal life, to contemplate the work of salvation in a manner that drew them into the depths of its source in the Trinity—and also awakened them to the compelling salvific authority of the incarnate Word. With this in mind we may turn directly to the particular vantage point which the divine ideas teaching gives to Christian reflection upon soteriology. In the following sections of this chapter, then, we consider the implicit and sometimes explicit role of the divine ideas tradition in the soteriologies of three theologians who wield the tradition with particular insight and skill.

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The Rescuing, Truth-Bearing Word in Eriugena Writing just about exactly midway chronologically between Augustine and Aquinas, John Scotus Eriugena articulated a wonderfully creative theological metaphysics—pioneering ways of thought that often provide the crucial background for the teaching of later thinkers such as Hadewijch and Eckhart. Eriugena referred to the eternal conceiving of all things, in the generation of the Word, as the begetting of the Word in the “Womb” of the Father, in which act of begetting are contained “the reasons of all things visible and invisible” and these are, therefore, “co-eternal with the Father and the Son”; for God did not get to know all things after they were made, but before they had been made he knew all things that were to be made, and – what is more wonderful – all things are precisely because they were foreknown. For the essence of all things is nothing but the knowledge of all things in the Divine Wisdom.³⁷

In this passage from John’s monumental dialogue On the Division of Nature, the master (John calls him the Nutritor) has been explaining to his perplexed disciple that while the Word precedes the primordial ideas of all things causally, one could also say (because of course there is no temporal sequence in God) that the Father’s knowing of all things in the Word is co-eternal and one event with the conceiving of the Word. In his Homily to the Prologue of John, Eriugena observes that “the generation of the Word from the Father is the creation of all causes and the effective production of all things which proceed from the causes as genus and kind.”³⁸ As we saw above, along with Origen and Augustine, John takes the phrase “what has come into being in him was life” (John 1.3–4) to refer to the imperishable vivacity of these eternal “events” of divine knowing in the Word, so much so that, as the Creator, it is in fact God’s own knowing of the creatures, as divine ideas—the truest and fullest form of their existence—which is the primordial cause or ground of every creature’s finite existence in time. What is “created in the Wisdom of God is life and wisdom”: “every creature, then, exists and lives in the Word, which is the Wisdom of God; and nothing which is in it can perish.”³⁹ Needless to say, this perspective, explicitly elucidating a divine ideas teaching, has powerful ramifications for soteriology.

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And what is true of all creatures is no less true of humankind. As the disciple puts it somewhat earlier: I understand the substance of the whole man to be nothing else but the concept (notio) of him in the Mind of his Artificer, Who knew all things in Himself before they were made; and that very knowledge is the true and only substance of the things known, since it is in that knowledge that they are most perfectly created and eternally and immutably subsist.⁴⁰

To which the master affirms in response: “We may then define man as follows: man is a certain intellectual concept formed eternally in the Mind of God” (Homo est notio quaedam intellectualis in mente divino aeternaliter facta).⁴¹ Here we come to a fairly direct statement of the divine ideas position, with ample hints of what it might mean. For Eriugena, it is true that the creatures not only have their eternal ground in the Word, but must continually turn to the Word and contemplate the Word in order to move toward the full consummation of their own identity: . . . for in ever being turned towards the one Form of all things, which all things seek, I mean the Word of the Father, they are formed, and never anywhere depart from their formation, for the causes of places and times are in them; but the things which are below them are so created by them in the lower order of things that [the causes] may draw them to themselves and may seek the one Principle of all things, but they themselves by no means look towards the things that are below them, but eternally contemplate their Form which is above them, so that they do not cease to be eternally formed by it. For in themselves they are formless and know that they themselves are perfectly created in their universal Form, I mean the Word.⁴²

In speaking this way, Eriugena highlights the continuing transmission, from the patristic era to the Middle Ages, of this important Christological work being performed by the divine ideas tradition, namely that the grounding of all creatures in Christ is also the basis for the return and re-creation of all creatures through their fidelity to Christ. What is particularly clear in John the Irishman is exactly this link between salvation and the contemplative reforming of the creatures as they turn to the Word and are renewed in the vivacity of their primordial causes. In his view, the primordial ideas in

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the Word are the causes of the things in time, but most importantly, their eternal forms of truth and beauty in the Word should arouse their finite expressions towards a contemplation of their truth, their idea, and so “may seek the one Principle of all things,” namely the Word who is “their universal Form.” This strong contemplative momentum, which in Eriugena’s view is salutary and necessary for creaturely health and development, would of course be vitiated if the creatures began to turn away from their truth in God by falling into fantasies of their own. Indeed John follows Augustine in understanding sin as a devastating fall into an illusory world in which human beings, attempting to satiate their desires by seeing other creatures as merely the objects of their own fantasies, are led farther and farther away from the real truth and goodness and life of things. As creatures turn their minds away from the vital reality of things as they are in the Word, they are the more prey to the “darkness of variegated phantasies” so that the human understanding is mesmerized and “turned back from the splendours of clear truth and is held in the grasp of the bodily shadows to which it has become accustomed” (683D). This has cosmic implications for all the creatures: John, following Maximus the Confessor, affirms a crucial contemplative role for the human as the creature who, holding together the goodness of the material and the spiritual, is meant to prize the bountiful goodness and truth of all things as a gift of the Creator, and so by non-possessive contemplation re-unite the whole creation with its origin and end in God.⁴³ And if the human being, precisely with this calling on behalf of the other creatures, has been unable to set its mind on the divine truth of things, then the variety and differences of the whole created world become distorted into divisiveness and antipathy (536D). When we turn directly to John’s soteriology, then, we see that not only does he present Christ the incarnate Word as the one in whom the truth of all creatures can be savingly encountered and renewed, but he directs our attention in particular to the death and resurrection of Jesus as the means by which the creatures are brought into true life. In response to the creatures’ descent into false and antagonistic understandings of all things, including themselves, it makes eminent sense in John’s view for the Word to enter their condition: “for even corporeal natures, and every sensible creature, are in Him [the Word] life endowed with wisdom and eternal existence, so that in Him, in a mysterious and incomprehensible yet credible manner every creature lives and is life” (907D). “Tell me, then,” the disciple asks, “whether the Word of God in Whom the Causes of all things eternally subsist, came into the effects of those Causes, that is to say, into this sensible world, or not”

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(910C–D). Yes, the master replies, “whoever denies this would be a stranger to the true faith which worships one God and preaches the Incarnation of his Word” (910D). So here we have, as the master goes on to say (910A–912A), a real incarnation in “the sensible world,” a taking by the Word to himself of humanity and thus a drawing of humanity (and all creation within humanity) into the fullness of its authentic life and truth; and for this reason it was important for John to have insisted earlier that “I understand the substance of the whole man to be nothing else but the concept of him in the Mind of his Artificer” (768B, quoted above). Eriugena thus teaches that Christ the Word becomes present to all the fallen, creaturely patterns of human existence in order to confront our humanity with the real truth of itself as it has been eternally known and loved in God.⁴⁴ He descended “that in his humanity he might save the effects of the causes which in his divinity he possesses eternally . . . and that he might call them back into their causes that they might be preserved in them by a mystical unification, just as the causes also are preserved” (912B).⁴⁵ In the common humanity of our world, in the actual historical expressions of the divine idea of human life, we can see that the effects of this idea have gone badly astray, says John, but in Christ those effects can be called back into harmony and unity with their imperishable truth. And here John fully credits the authentic weight and significance of earthly existence, for he goes on to ascribe potentially tragic and eternal consequences to the final historical disposition: “if the Wisdom of God did not descend into the effects of the causes which enjoy everlasting life in it, the principle of the causes would perish; for no cause could survive the destruction of the effects of its cause, any more than the effects could survive the destruction of their causes” (912B–C).⁴⁶ What Eriugena seems to say here is that it is truly an ineliminable aspect of the eternal idea of the creatures that they should come to exist and flourish in time, fulfilling their true callings and identities as whatever they have it in them to become. This is part of the very truth of them, and the Word acts in time and space to rescue and restore the possibility of this full and final flourishing. This language about the real possibility of perishing, determined in the historical sphere, suggests to me that, for all the grandeur of his Christian Platonist metaphysics, John does truly see the historical events at the center of Christianity to be determinative for theology. And so, weaving together reminiscences from the Psalms and John’s Gospel, Eriugena reflects on the parting of Christ’s spirit from him in death, and its return in the resurrection:

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“His spirit shall go forth and shall return again unto his own country.” Whose spirit: Surely his who, when nailed to the cross for us, drooped his head and gave up his spirit. And whither is it to go forth? He descended into hell. For what purpose? To lead out our human nature which had been held in bondage there . . . but since death was not able to hold captive him in whom she found no sin, he returns again to his own country: he [the spirit of Christ] reverts to his own nature, the nature which he had created, redeemed, made his own; he puts on the body of immortality, the first state of man’s nature, and in addition the glory of his own resurrection. And that you may know that he who promised that his spirit should go forth alone, shall himself return not alone, but bringing the whole of human nature with him (cum tota humana natura), hear his very words: “if a grain of wheat fall not into the earth and die, it remains alone; but if it shall have died it beareth much fruit.” (748A–B)

In this passage we can see how John infuses his divine ideas teaching with the logic of the death and resurrection of Jesus. For not only does Christ by his dying encounter and rescue the humanity held captive in hell and death, restoring it to union with its truth in himself (“the first state of man’s nature” in all its primordial vitality), but in resurrection he brings “the whole of human nature with him” into that glory which is the Father’s vindication of his truth, namely, his resurrection.⁴⁷

Assimilation to True Life in Aquinas and Bonaventure By the time of Aquinas and Bonaventure, elements in The Division of Nature, which seemed to some authorities to imply a kind of pantheism, were being condemned. And yet we find the commentaries of both Thomas and Bonaventure on John’s Gospel carefully following the very passages in Origen, Augustine, and Eriugena we considered above, and many of John the Irishman’s most prominent concerns reach a lucidly systematic account in the great Dominican and Franciscan scholastics, the Angelic and the Seraphic Doctors (as Thomas and Bonaventure came to be known). Commenting on the phrase, “all things were made through him,” Thomas writes: Whoever conceives something must preconceive it in his wisdom, which is the form and pattern of the thing made: as the form preconceived in the mind of an artisan is the pattern of the cabinet to be made. So God makes

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nothing except through the conception of his intellect, which is an eternally conceived wisdom, that is, the Word of God, and the Son of God. Accordingly, it is impossible that he should make anything except through the Son. And so Augustine says, in The Trinity, that the Word is the art full of the living patterns of things. Thus it is clear that all things that the Father makes, he makes through him.⁴⁸

As we have seen, this note is often present in discussions of John 1.4—that the creatures have their life in the Word through whom they are created. Commenting on the same verse, Bonaventure also adverts to the same passages in Augustine to observe that all things are in the Word “before they come to be, and live in him, like a chest of drawers in the mind the cabinet maker.”⁴⁹ As Thomas puts it in another context, “the likeness of a creature in the Word is, in a certain sense, the very life of the creature itself.”⁵⁰ So Thomas observes that the creatures, considered in themselves, are not always living, nor even if they are living, are they life itself. Yet when all things are considered as they are [eternally] in the Word, they are not merely living, but also life. For the archetypes which exist spiritually in the wisdom of God, and through which things were made by the Word, are life, just as a chest made by an artisan is in itself neither alive nor life, yet the exemplar of the chest in the artisan’s mind prior to the existence of the chest is in some sense living, insofar as it has an intellectual existence in the mind of the artisan.⁵¹

For Thomas and Bonaventure, it is not enough simply to highlight this living quality of an idea in the mind as compared with the finite and limited existence of an individual thing in time and space. Rather both thinkers re-work the analogy much more thoroughly in terms of the Trinitarian understanding of God—and, crucially, in terms of creation’s fittingness for re-creation in the Word. Whereas a human artisan’s thoughts are not really one with existence itself, this very much is the case with God, whose “act of understanding is his life and his essence. And so whatever is in God is not only living, but is life itself, because whatever is in God is his essence. Hence the creature in God is the creating essence” of God.⁵² So Thomas and Bonaventure in common with the tradition from Origen through Augustine, Eriugena, and Anselm emphasize that this conceiving of all things in God is one with the Father’s eternal begetting of the Word: “Since God by

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understanding Himself understands all other things . . . the Word conceived in God by His understanding of Himself must also be the Word of all things.”⁵³ Thomas draws a crucial conclusion from all this: because by God’s “knowledge He produces things in being,” and because this divine selfknowledge is none other than the Word, “therefore the Word of God must for all things which are made be the perfect existing intelligibility.”⁵⁴ As the ratio of all creatures, Christ the Word incarnate is most aptly the light of all creatures, the redemptive source of grace by which, re-united through Christ with their truth in God, the creatures are restored to themselves and become children of God. In an analogous way, Bonaventure suggests that the Word is the perfect image and exemplar of all the Father knows and will speak into time; and referring to this perfect imaging as a kind of mirror, Bonaventure adds: “In this mirror all things produced shine forth in their exemplarity, from the beginning of the creation of the world until the end, to bring about the perfection of the universe both spiritually and materially. And consequently Christ, as the uncreated Word, is the intellectual mirror and eternal exemplar of the entire worldly structure.”⁵⁵ Bonaventure’s notion of the Word as the exemplar of all creatures, and Thomas’ similar view of the Word as their “perfect existing intelligibility,” mean that creatures are aptly and fittingly oriented to the Word as to the One whose eternal procession bears the deep mystery of their own meaning and reality in God. To meet the Word incarnate would be to meet the embodied exemplar of their own lives. Their “rational essences live in him,” says Bonaventure of the Word, meaning that the fullness of all creatures’ primordial existence, as God knows and loves it eternally, is inexhaustibly and unvanquishably present in the Word.⁵⁶ This is so precisely because, as Bonaventure put it, the exemplary existence of all creatures in the Word is “to bring about the perfection of the universe both spiritually and materially.” To rediscover the truth of themselves, to be brought again into unity with that imperishable goodness, God’s idea of each created being, would be to heal and perfect the world. So when Thomas suggests that the creatures meet their true Word in Christ, he is far from merely talking about human noetic acts, but is rather pointing to the assimilation, the likening, of the creatures to their perfect reality, their “truing” in Christ. As he puts it in Q. 16 of the Summa theologiae: A house is said to be true that expresses the likeness of the form in the architect’s mind; and words are said to be true in so far as they are the signs of truth in the intellect. In the same way natural things are said to be true in

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so far as they express the likeness of the species that are in the divine mind. For a stone is called true, which possesses the nature proper to a stone, according to the preconception in the divine intellect. (ST I.16.1)

If we remember that for Thomas the perfect correspondence of the Word to the Father is the very ground of all truth and intelligibility, then the encounter of the fallen creatures with their own primal truth in Christ would mean their judgment and, through conversion to Christ, their restoration. As Eriugena had argued: “if Christ who understands all things, who indeed is the understanding of all things, really unified all that he assumed, who doubts but that what first took place in the Head and principal Exemplar of the whole of human nature will eventually happen in the whole?” (545B). The Incarnation inaugurates the spiritual conversion to the full truth of the creatures in God, and the Paschal mystery leads to its consummation. This Paschal theme is even more pronounced in Bonaventure’s approach. Perhaps because of his devotion to St. Francis, who so mysteriously embodied in his own flesh the costly commitment of Christ to all creatures, Bonaventure’s reflections on the role of the divine ideas in creation are deeply grounded in the Paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. Even when he ponders the contemplation of Wisdom (in whom the ideas dwell), Bonaventure immerses the ideas in what seems to be the analogy between the maternal labor of childbirth/passion of Christ in John 16:20–22. In his sermons on the six days of creation, Bonaventure interprets the creation of the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day in relation to contemplation. He suggests the sun as an apt image of the intense purity and radiance of eternal Wisdom, and of a mind enlightened by contemplating her, arguing that she is by her fruitful illuminating power able to bring forth the full flowering of everything—not only in the contemplative’s mind but even in and through the agonizing unfolding of history. In eternal Wisdom there is a principle of fecundity tending to the conceiving, the bearing and the bringing forth of everything that pertains to the universality of the laws. For all the exemplar reasons are conceived from all eternity in the womb or the uterus of eternal Wisdom . . . . And as it conceived them from all eternity so also it produced [them] or bore [them] in time, and later, gave birth [to them] by suffering in the flesh. And the intelligence is able to understand this and in so doing, it has attained the highest contemplation.⁵⁷

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In this striking passage, Bonaventure holds together eternity and time, divine life and human existence, precisely within the medium of the Incarnation. The Franciscan suggests that the eternal begetting of the Word, the infinite communication of divine self-knowing, is an eternal event of great fruitfulness and fecundity, for it is also “the conceiving, the bearing and bringing forth” of the universal laws or exemplar reasons of all creatures who are thereby “conceived from all eternity in the womb” of Wisdom. Bonaventure portrays Wisdom as carrying the archetypes of all creatures-tobe within her “womb or uterus,” and this maternal imagery powerfully highlights the eternally loving presence and divine life of the ideas; but also, importantly, the imagery suggests that there might be some sense in which the “birth” of the ideas into their finite existence as creatures in history is crucial to their life (not to be born into finite existence would mean a terrible loss or at least an unfulfillment, not a preservation in purity). Moreover the passage goes on to intensify this sense; for Bonaventure seems to view the temporal flourishing of the ideas to be the result of Wisdom’s own costly bearing of them into time, and mysteriously giving birth to them “by suffering in the flesh”—in context, surely references to the incarnation of Wisdom and the passion of Christ as God’s Wisdom. We can understand Bonaventure’s thinking here all the more clearly when we realize how fundamentally the Incarnation renews and consummates the creation in his view. The eminent Bonaventure scholar Zachary Hayes offers this helpful synthesis of ideas from across the Franciscan’s oeuvre, drawing out the significance of the Word’s exemplarity: It is only when we perceive the world in its symbolic nature as the objectification of the self-knowledge of God that we know it in its true reality. In the most fundamental sense, it is God in His own selfknowledge who is the exemplar of all else; and since God exists only as a Trinity, exemplarity refers to the entire Trinity. But, writes Bonaventure, the Son proceeds by way of exemplarity. The entire mystery of the Trinity is reflected in a particular way in the mystery of the Son. As the full and total expression of God’s primal fruitfulness, He is simultaneously the expression of all that God can be in relation to the finite . . . . As the Word is the inner self-expression of God, the created order is the external expression of the inner Word. It follows, then, that the created universe possesses in its inner constitution a relation to the uncreated Word.⁵⁸

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Because the Word contains within himself the eternal reasons of all creatures, and because the world of all creatures is the finite expression in time of this eternal Word, the incarnate presence of the Word among the creatures is the key that unlocks and liberates their true being. As Hayes puts it, “the created universe possesses in its inner constitution a relation to the uncreated Word,” and this is why, I am arguing, Bonaventure, like Thomas, sees Christ as able to restore and assimilate the creatures to their full reality. We can see him describing this process in terms drawn from the same Timaean trope employed by our other authors, but with a wonderful awareness of the rescuing advent of the Word in time. Think, begins the Seraphic Doctor, of how a work of art “proceeds from the artisan according to a similitude that exists in the mind,” and how the artisan carefully studies this ideal pattern in the mind in order to produce an “external work bearing the closest possible resemblance to the interior exemplar.”⁵⁹ So far Bonaventure follows the familiar course of the analogy, but now he pushes farther, seeming to imbue the Timaean pattern with historical life: “And if it were possible to produce an effect which could know and love the artisan, the artisan would certainly do this. And if that effect could know its maker, this would be by means of the similitude according to which it came from the hands of the artisan.”⁶⁰ Suddenly the beautiful work of art is no longer a chest of drawers or a box, but in Bonaventure’s creative re-telling it has become a living being, a creature who has a fundamental orientation towards its creator—indeed a creature whom the Creator has imbued with a fundamental calling to seek after its author through love and knowledge. Moreover, Bonaventure seems to suggest that it is precisely as the creature traces along the grain of its own being that it draws ever nearer to its creative source: for the Artisan has designed a world in which creatures might come to the very truth of their own essence as they seek in loving contemplation the One in whom their exemplary existence dwells, to come to the truth of themselves as they are united with the infinite beauty and exemplarity of God’s knowing and loving of God. Yet in the historical life of creatures, sin obscures and disfigures the image of the eternal ideas reflected into time, making the contemplation of the exemplar beyond creaturely grasp: And if the eyes of [the work of art’s] understanding were so darkened that it could not be elevated above itself in order to come to a knowledge of its maker, it would be necessary for the similitude according to which the effect was produced to lower itself to that sort of nature which the effect

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could grasp and know. In like manner, understand that no creature has proceeded from the most high Creator except through the eternal Word, “in whom God has disposed all things,” and by which Word God has produced creatures bearing not only the nature of a vestige but also that of an image so that through knowledge and love creatures might become like God. And since by sin the rational creature had dimmed the eye of contemplation, it was most fitting that the eternal and invisible should become visible and assume flesh in order to lead us back to God.⁶¹

For Bonaventure, as we see in this remarkable passage, the Exemplar in whom are the creative reasons of all creatures—the contemplation of which could have led the creatures into harmony with their own being—is no static eternal principle, but the living and active Word who freely expresses the Father’s Meaning within the visible, historical welter of the world. It’s helpful to see how thoroughly, in Bonaventure’s divine ideas perspective, the Christian economy of salvation welds together the domains of the creation’s intelligibility, the rational creatures’ intelligence, and the divine Word in whom the coherent truth of all beings is exemplified. I raise this point especially because the interaction of these three domains is often considered a purely epistemological concern, entirely subject to an easy divorce with the later rise of Nominalist and then post-Cartesian views about human knowing. But for Bonaventure, and indeed for almost the whole of the Christian tradition prior to the late medieval and early modern periods, the integrity of the three domains—creation’s intelligibility and beauty, the rational creatures’ participation in that intelligibility, and the Word’s creative and re-creative care for this reality—is fully a matter of theological and indeed soteriological significance. And the rational creatures, who bear not simply a vestige or trace but an image of the Image, who are in fact embodied exemplars of the Exemplar, are called by their very constitution towards a contemplative fulfillment by seeking and understanding the hidden speaking of the Word in their fellow creatures. This means, again, that the divine ideas teaching underscores the significance of the human noetic journey as a crucial feature of theological anthropology (as well as soteriology), that it is not, in other words, simply reducible to pretheological debates about epistemology. In Bonaventure’s view this is because the saving work of the incarnate Word has renovated the spiritual and moral ordering of the human condition; the loving obedience of Christ becomes grace in all his members. This allows humankind once more to recognize the Word in all his embodied expressions and, by re-tracing

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through them the self-communication of divine goodness, to contemplate the blazing beauty of the creaturely archetypes sustained forever in the Word eternal, Beauty itself. Earlier in this chapter we noticed how Christian thinkers had adapted the analogy of an artisan whose mind contains the living ideas of whatever is to be made in physical materials. Under the influence, I argue, of the church’s ongoing encounter with Christ, Christian theology then revolutionized the ancient Mediterranean notion of humanity’s fulfillment as requiring a contemplative turn or ascent; in the thinkers we considered, this contemplative ascent becomes richly imbued with yearning for the eternal Word in whom the divine ideas are known by God. We then saw in Eriugena a strong early example of how the ideas-bearing Word Incarnate comes to rescue and re-establish the truth of the creatures in time. And finally we have seen the development of this divine ideas element within soteriology in the later figures of Aquinas and Bonaventure. In all this, I have suggested, the fruitfulness and agility of the divine ideas doctrine makes itself apparent. Here is a matrix within which the being of the creatures in time, their being in the noetic journey of human knowers, and their imperishable being in the eternal Word all come to a re-creative and salvific communion in the Incarnation. In the history of Christian thought, beliefs about salvation have played an enormously formative role, shaping the search of faith for deeper understanding in almost every domain of Christian doctrine. I believe this is because as Christians have sought to understand more profoundly what has happened to them as they share in Christ’s dying and rising they have, as it were, looked through their conversion and re-creation in Christ into the heart of God. Christian reflection on salvation has also led (because of the connections made by the divine ideas) to contemplation of God’s meaning in creation, of the calling and destiny of the human person, of highly diverse perspectives on the nature of human sin, as well as the most authentic shape of the community in which Christ’s mending and renovation of creation might be accomplished. While ancient and medieval theories of salvation certainly included a strand of what might be called penal substitutionary atonement, the divine ideas tradition points us towards the greater coherence of other approaches. And this perhaps comports well with contemporary insights of our own. As emancipatory theologies of almost every sort have brought us to see, soteriologies dominated by the postulation of a divine demand for punitive or retributive violence—in which Christ’s suffering and death reveal divine anger rather than human antagonism towards

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divine love—are soteriologies that almost inevitably foment exclusion and violence against the marginalized, the different, and any whom social hierarchies cast out in order to affirm their own righteousness. Perhaps especially for this reason, then, it is vital for Christian theology to recover and elucidate soteriologies that genuinely bring good news to the poor and set the oppressed free. I have sought to demonstrate throughout this chapter how the divine ideas tradition has helped to foster and sustain such life-giving understandings of salvation—precisely because the divine ideas teaching has allowed Christian thinkers to see within the self-giving of Jesus the eternal divine love for all creatures from which God’s saving action in time flows. This perspective has also allowed Christians to ponder the ways in which fidelity to Christ draws human beings, and the whole creation, closer to the truth of themselves, as they have always been known and loved in God.

Notes 1. Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity XV.23 trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. p. 415. 2. Mark A. McIntosh, Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). 3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation, 13.6, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 94. 4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, 92.17, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955), 282. 5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia.19.4, resp. 6. Thomas Aquinas, In librum Dionysii de divinis nominibus expositio IV, ix, 409, as quoted in Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 231. 7. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names VII.2, as quoted in Eric Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 98. 8. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names V.8, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 102. 9. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, IV.13, p. 82. 10. Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. Suzanne Noffke, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000 and 2001), vol. 1, pp. 120, 132. 11. Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man From Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2001), 119.

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12. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon 560B–C, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and John O’Meara (Montreal: Editions Bellarmin, 1987), 162. The large three-digit number and letters given in the margins of this edition will be used as the parenthetical reference for this text hereafter; they correspond to the columns and sections of the Migne edition, Patrologia Latina 122, and all Latin quotations are from this edition. For a very encouraging guide through the vast and echoing Carolingian splendors of Eriugena’s thought, see Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 13. Augustine of Hippo, Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, I.17, trans. Edmund Hill O.P., ed. and introduction Allen D. Fitzgerald, O.P. (New York: New City Press, 2009), pp. 52–l. 14. Augustine of Hippo, Homilies on the Gospel of John, I.12,1, p. 48. 15. Augustine of Hippo, Homilies on the Gospel of John, I.2–3, p. 49. 16. Augustine, Miscellany of Eighty-Three Questions, Q. 46, in Responses to Miscellaneous Questions, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: New City Press, 2008), 60. 17. John Scotus Eriugena, Homily on the Gospel of John 18, in John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 172. 18. Eriugena, Homily on the Gospel of John 18, p. 165. 19. Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion and Proslogion, with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), Monologion 31, p. 50. 20. Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, vol. 1, trans. Members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975), Letter 110, pp. 165–6. 21. Colossians 3:1–3. 22. Bonaventure, “Christ, the One Teacher of All,” section 7, in What Manner of Man? Sermons on Christ by St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1989), 27. 23. McGinn, Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 328, n. 16. 24. Meister Eckhart, “Commentary on the Gospel of John,” para. 10–12, in Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (trans.), Meister Eckhart, the Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 125–126. 25. Grigory Benevich, “God’s Logoi and Human Personhood in St. Maximus the Confessor,” Studi sull’Oriente Cristiano (Roma: Accademia Angelica-Constantiniana di Lettere Arti e Scienze 2009), 137–152 (138–139). 26. Alexander Golitzin, Mystagogy: A Monastic Reading of Dionysius Areopagita, ed. Bogdan G. Bucur (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2013), 104. 27. Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 38,” as quoted in McGinn, Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 125. 28. McGinn, Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 128. 29. McGinn, Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 143.

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30. Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 29,” in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Frank J. Tobin, Bernard McGinn, and Elvira Borgstädt (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 289. 31. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 146. 32. Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ, 146. 33. Hadewijch, “Vision Four,” as quoted in Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ, 147. 34. Louis Bouyer, Women Mystics, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). 28–31. 35. As quoted in Bouyer, Women Mystics, 28. 36. Bouyer, Women Mystics, 28. 37. Eriugena, Periphyseon, 558B–559B, pp. 160–161. 38. John Scotus Eriugena, “Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John,” §7, in Celtic Spirituality, ed. and trans. Oliver Davies (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 416. 39. 907C–D, 908B–C. See also Eriugena, “Prologue,” in Celtic Spirituality, 418–419: “All things existed – or subsisted – in him as causes before they came into existence in themselves as effects” (§9) and thus “all things therefore that were made through him live immutably in him and are life. In him all things neither existed nor shall exist according to intervals of time and space, but all things in him are above time and space and are one” for “all the things which are made through the Word live in him and are life in him” (§10). 40. Periphyseon, 768B–C. 41. Periphyseon, 768B–C. 42. Periphyseon, 547C–D: “Semper enim ad unam rerum omnium formam, quam omnia appetunt, Verbum Patris dico, conversae formantur, et formationem suam nusquam nunquam deserunt. Causae quippe locorum et temporem in eis sunt; quae vero sub ipsis sunt in inferioribus rerum ordinibus, ita ab eis creantur, ut ad seipsas ea attrahant, omniumque rerum unum principium appetant; ipsae vero nullo modo ad ea, quae sub eis sunt, respiciunt, sed suam formam superiorem se semper intuentur, ut semper ab ea formari non desinant. Nam per seipsas informes sunt, et in ea universali sua forma, in Verbo dico, semetipsas perfecte conditas cognoscunt.” 43. See Willemien Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 1991); on this central theme in Maximus, see Torstein Theodor Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and also Eric Perl, “Metaphysics and Christology in Maximus Confessor and Eriugena,” in Eriugena: East and West, Papers of the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugena Studies, ed. Bernard McGinn and

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44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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Willemien Otten (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 253–270. As Aquinas would later argue: “As the Father speaks himself and every creature by his begotten Word, inasmuch as the Word begotten adequately represents the Father and every creature; so he loves himself and every creature by the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as the Holy Spirit proceeds as the love of the primal goodness whereby the Father loves himself and every creature” (Summa theologiae I.37.2 ad. 3). For a most lucid account of the divine ideas in Thomas’ theological metaphysics, see Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 912B: “nisi ut causarum, quas secundum suam divinitatem aeternaliter et incommutabiliter habet, secundum suam humanitatem effectus salvaret, inque suas causas revocaret, ut in ipsis ineffabili quadam adunatione, sicuti et ipsae causae salvarentur.” 912B–C: “Si Dei sapientia in effectus causarum, quae in ea aeternaliter vivunt, non descenderet, causarum ratio periret: pereuntibus enim causarum effectibus nulla causa remaneret, sicut pereuntibus causis nulli remanerent effectus.” See Werner Beierwaltes, “Language and Object: Reflexions on Eriugena’s Valuation of the Function and Capacities of Language,” in Jean Scot Écrivain, ed. G.-H. Allard (Montreal: Institut des Etudes Médiévâles, 1986), 224: “The return of the world to its divine origin, to its most unified and spiritual form, is also conceived, as I have suggested, as a transition . . . . Christ’s resurrection is the precondition of this transforming transition and ascent. Eriugena describes the transition that is Christ’s resurrection as one that leads all that is perceptible . . . to the originating sources that are the creative constitutive being of God. This spiritualizing of the perceptible, this removing of finitude from the finite is not a destruction of the world, but a raising-up and perfecting of the world, and alteration and salvation of it.” Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Lecture 2.77, trans. James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R. Larcher, Aquinas Scripture series, vol. 4 (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1980), 52. Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of John I.11, trans. Robert J. Karris, O.F.M., Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. XI (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2007), 66. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth, 4.8, reply, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 199. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John, Lecture 2.91, p. 56. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John, Lecture 2.91, p. 56. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation 13.6, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 94. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation 13.6, p. 94. See also Thomas’ answer to the question, Whether God is Truth?: “Truth is found in

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55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

     the intellect according as it apprehends a thing as it is; and in things according as they have being conformable to an intellect [i.e., that they are intelligible]. This is to the greatest degree found in God. For His being is not only conformed to His intellect, but it is the very act of His intellect; and His act of understanding [i.e., the eternal begetting of the Word] is the measure and cause of every other being and of every other intellect, and He Himself is His own existence and act of understanding. Whence it follows not only that truth is in Him, but that He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth” (Summa theologiae I.16.5). Bonaventure, Defense of the Mendicants 2.12, trans. Robert J. Karris, O.F.M., The Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. XV (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2010), 61–62. Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of John I.11, trans. Robert J. Karris, O.F.M, Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. XI (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2007), 66. Bonaventure, Collations on the Six Days, 20.5, trans. Jose de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970), 301–302. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M., The Hidden Center: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure (New York: Paulist Press, 1981/Franciscan Institute Press, 2000), 59–60. Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology 12, trans. Sr. Emma Therese Healy, S.S.J., Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. I (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1996), 49. Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology 12, 49–51. Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology 12, 51.

4 The Resurrection of Christ and the True Life of All Creatures Reality as Communication of Divine Goodness In this chapter I want to continue following the trace of the divine ideas teaching, showing how it helps us to recognize and understand a deep sense of contemplative calling. Perhaps this vocation is natural to the gift of our human condition, but it is, I would argue, transfigured and consummated through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. If I’m right in suggesting that the divine ideas tradition presupposes and nurtures a sense of humanity’s contemplative calling, what exactly is it that we human beings are drawn to understand in the deepest possible way—and how is this calling transformed by the passion and resurrection of Christ? Christians believe that the infinite goodness and generosity of God flow in and through all creatures—a continuous gift within them all, a likeness of the full plenitude of goodness which is God. Because of its total ubiquity, this divine generosity is hidden in plain sight, seemingly the natural, beneficial, mutuality of creaturely existence. At the most basic level this generosity takes the form of the unstinting and unceasing bestowal of each creature’s existence, and, at another level, the nourishment and air and light that sustain the earthly life of things. Sometimes, Christians believe, God enables rational creatures to become especially alive to this flowing generosity—in moments, for example, when we are caught off guard by the immense beauty of a sunset or the vulnerable loveliness of an infant’s first smile. In a most beautiful passage from his treatise on the Trinity, Augustine invites the human mind on a contemplative journey towards the recognition of the divine goodness that radiates within every being. And this also leads to a recognition of an imperishable standard of goodness, an archetypal reason, by which our mind is able to recognize and contemplate the truth of the goodness we perceive.

The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology. Mark A. McIntosh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Mark A. McIntosh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.003.0005

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You certainly only love what is good, and the earth is good with its lofty mountains and its folded hills and its level plains . . . and the heart of a friend is good with its sweet accord and loving trust, and a just man is good . . . and the sky is good with its sun and moon and stars, and angels are good with their holy obedience, and speech is good as it pleasantly instructs and suitably moves the hearer, and a song is good with its melodious notes and its noble sentiments. Why go on and on? This is good and that is good. Take away this and that and see good itself if you can. In this way you will see God, not with some other good, but the good of every good. For surely among all these good things I have listed and whatever others can be observed or thought of, we would not say that one is better than another when we make a true judgment unless we had impressed on us some notion of good itself by which we both approve of a thing, and also prefer one thing to another.¹

There is an ascending and descending arc in the pattern of thought to which Augustine invites his readers. First he allows our minds to rest in the goodness and beauty of individual objects or human practices; but then he draws us upwards to consider the source of that goodness from which all individual good things flow—and this source he of course identifies as God. So he has already begun to train our minds to recognize and interpret the goodness in the reality we encounter (as objects) as in fact a communication to us, in them and through them, from God. But then comes the remarkable third step that seemingly returns us to the level of our own existence as a rational creatures; here Augustine invites us to consider how it is that we recognize all these good things as in fact good, and suggests that there must be within our minds an impression of that archetypal goodness from which they flow—a likeness that radiantly illuminates our perception and allows it in some sense to share in the primordial communication from which all things derive their being. Augustine, I believe, thus unveils the human contemplative calling to be a transformation of consciousness, in which our perception shifts from seeing the world around us merely as objects to another mode of perception that participates in the mind of the Author of all good things—and is informed and illuminated by that divine communication of knowing and loving. To return for a moment to the analogy I used in the first chapter of this book, it would be as if characters within a novel were enabled to regard themselves, each other, and all the other elements within the novel, not from their perspective as characters looking out at other objects within the world of

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the novel, but rather with minds awakened to the authoring source of themselves and of all other things—enabled, in other words, to recognize their world as a communication of their own author, and filled with her meaning and intent. We could say that contemplation enables this transformation of consciousness for the very reason that it is in fact itself a form of prayer, a sharing by rational creatures in the communion of knowing and loving that is the life of the Trinity. Although God gives creation immeasurable goodness at all times and in all places, we sometimes become more aware of the divine source of the goodness because we learn to recognize and name it through the instrumentality of prayer: perhaps someone prays for God’s healing and reconciliation to be at work in a broken relationship; while God’s healing and reconciling power are indeed always available in every relationship, in this instance, because of the prayer that someone has made to God, she awakens to the deep meaning of the healing and reconciliation that she now perceives to be available, i.e., she sees it as God’s answer to her prayer—which indeed it is. Christian liturgical life creates a more universal form of this lens for recognizing God’s immense generosity in all things; in worship, ordinary things such as water, oil, bread, and wine are taken up into the prayer of the church and God’s power and generosity are identified at work within them—a power and generosity that are at the very heart of their existence always, but whose origin and significance are revealed as they are taken up into the action of Christ, marked and consummated by his own intention. For Christians, all these signs and tokens by which we learn to recognize and contemplate the immense goodness of God’s communication to us in all things are extensions of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection—as the constitutive expression within our world of God’s self-communication. Perhaps we could say that Christ’s action reveals, through his embodiment of the divine meaning or exemplars of all things, the full plenitude of divine significance and intention within every creature—thereby drawing human contemplation of that divine significance towards a fulfillment that is itself an ever greater participation in God’s own eternal act of knowing. Let me offer a very rudimentary account of why this might be so; that is, why Christ’s action might draw human contemplation into a transformation of consciousness. Throughout his earthly ministry, the Gospels portray Jesus as holding elements of the created order—vessels of water, inadequate amounts of loaves and fishes, afflicted human beings, broken and hurtful social relations, even those who have died—up into the intentions and

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power of the one he called Father, for the Father to bring to light a deeper truth of an unimaginable abundance. In the passion, Jesus consummates this holding of all things towards the Father; he makes an offering even of the world’s violent misjudgment and mistreatment of all that he is and all that he bears within himself, waiting for whatever the Father would make of these things. In eternity, Christians believe, the Father knows and rejoices in the truth of God and of all things in the eternal begetting of the Word, and this same act of divine knowing and rejoicing is expressed in our world as the Father’s resurrection of Christ, in which the Father acknowledges, vindicates, and rejoices in the truth of the Word incarnate and of all things in him, bringing this living truth to light, liberated from the world’s power to oppress, misuse, or harm it; and so bringing to birth the new creation. In Christianity, this redemption of creaturely truth in Christ draws the contemplative calling into its likeness. The contemplative considers the beings of this world and receives them in thought, attending with care to whatever hurt or distortion they may have suffered, and offering them into the light of God’s perfect knowing and loving of their eternal truth, prays that through Christ’s dying and rising they may find reconciliation and recreation through this contemplative communion with their imperishable exemplary life in God. I’m suggesting, then, that in this chapter we consider the way in which contemplation—as a letting go of one way of perceiving things in order to enter another way—is itself grounded in the eternal Trinitarian self-giving that, when projected into time, we call Christ’s death and resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit. It is the transition from knowing and loving something as an object which perhaps one is having to relinquish or to give away, and then by grace to be drawn into that knowing and loving which is the very giving of that thing to exist: the knowing and loving of its Author—thinking and loving it into being moment by moment. In a sense perhaps we could say that the divine ideas tradition assisted Christians in considering this transition, in noticing this possibility of coming to apprehend reality not as an object of a finite human knower, but rather as a moment of communication within the eternal divine self-sharing that constitutes everything. And, of course, it’s crucial to note that this transformation of consciousness includes within itself a transformation in the self-understanding of the one knowing—that is, a coming to recognize “oneself” in one’s exemplar existence within the divine mind, as already therefore a participant in and expression of the divine knowing and loving (much as we saw happening for Hadewijch in the previous chapter).

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In fact we see something very like this, proposed by Bonaventure in his account of Christ as the one who transforms our consciousness of reality. In this account, Bonaventure draws on the common understanding of the act of knowing in his era: the senses deliver to the mind an image or phantasm of the object perceived, and the mind must be able to abstract from this sense image the intelligible reality or species, the idea by which the truth of the object may be known. Christ teaches interiorly, so that no truth is known except through Him, not through speech as it is with us, but through inner enlightenment. Wherefore He must necessarily have within Himself the most clear species, which He cannot possibly have received from another. He Himself, then, is intimate to every soul, and He shines forth by means of His most clear species upon the obscure species of our understanding. And in this manner, these obscure species, mixed with the darkness of phantasms, are lit up in such a way that the intellect understands.²

What Bonaventure clearly wants us to notice is the way in which Christ, as the bearer of the eternal archetypes or true species (ideas) of every reality, enables our mind to shift from regarding something merely as an object to perceiving it radiantly from within the eternal knowing and loving by which it exists—that is, being able to perceive it in communion with the divine archetypes by which all things are created. The incarnate work of the eternal Word crucially reconstitutes this possibility within creation; for Christians, one particularly devastating result of the Fall can be found in a distortion and darkening of the human mind: instead of holding the creation together by sensing the divine goodness in the intelligible truth of every creature, fallen human beings are misled by sin into a bitterly divisive and possessive view of reality—every object becomes shrouded by fear, greed, and antagonism towards others. In Christ, however, human existence is united to the eternal Word, renewing humanity’s access to the divine knowing and loving at the heart of every creature, and thus restoring humanity’s contemplative calling to assist in the fulfillment of creation.³ My suggestion throughout this chapter, then, will be that the Paschal mystery of Christ is in fact the ground and means by which the human contemplative calling is drawn towards this fulfillment by sharing in the self-communication that is the very life of God. One final aspect of this line of thought: the contemplation of the divine truth of things, made possible in Christ, points not only “backwards” into our primordial existence within God’s eternal knowing and loving, but also

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“forwards” towards the beatific sharing in God’s self-understanding that Christians believe to be the life of the world to come. Eriugena reflects this aspect of the divine ideas tradition when he writes: “Blessed are they who enter into the Shrine of Wisdom, which is Christ; who have access to the uttermost darkness of that most excellent Light in which they behold all things in their Causes . . . ”⁴

In Christ the blessed share in God’s eternal self-knowing and so in a brightness and beauty which overwhelm and can only be experienced even by the blessed as a kind of darkness; there they contemplate the full reality of all things known and cherished in the divine mind, the exemplar causes of all reality.

A New Social Imaginary: Existence as Mystical Communication But to do this, that is to reconceive the world through a paschally transformed contemplation, would require us to be open in some sense to a new social imaginary, a mindset or way of looking at reality that is receptive to an unexpected depth of meaning, to sensing reality as a kind of communication. Commenting on his portrayal of the modern social imaginary in his magisterial work, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor remarks: I have been drawing a portrait of the world we have lost, one in which spiritual forces impinged on porous agents, in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular time in higher times, a society moreover in which the play of structure and anti-structure was held in equilibrium; and this human drama unfolded within a cosmos. All this has been dismantled and replaced by something quite different in the transformation we often roughly call disenchantment.⁵

As I suggested in the latter sections of Chapter 2, a significant element in this disenchantment was Christianity’s own diminishment of the theological aspect of the divine ideas teaching. Shorn of their Trinitarian and Christological grounding in early modernity, the divine ideas increasingly become curious and arcane implements in the hands of esoteric teachers such as Agrippa and Paracelsus. As the new natural philosophy began to divide

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between the new science on the one hand and occult practitioners on the other, the divine ideas in their much reduced form were largely stranded within the complicated ruminations of natural magic and its allied schools of thought—clearly the losing side in the rise of modern natural science. As a kind of thought experiment might we imagine how a new social imaginary, drawing on the resources of the divine ideas tradition, could plausibly attract and reorient contemporary ways of thinking. Certainly, it would be an imaginary that seeks not to discount or overturn our scientific worldview but rather to suggest an expansion of the significance of all that science conceives in its current contemplation of the universe. In other words, it would be a social imaginary that seeks to notice and respond to a depth of reality in things that we might call their communicative meaning. If this were possible, then it might be imaginable for the divine ideas tradition to find a less esoteric position within contemporary theology. It is fitting if perhaps a little unexpected that C. S. Lewis, a noted scholar of Renaissance literature, should have suggested a way forward towards such a recovery of the deep communication of meaning at the heart of all things— precisely by means of the analogy he offers us through his understanding of the artistry and work of the human imagination. For Lewis, humanity’s calling to appreciate the truth of goodness and beauty might be rediscovered precisely through the artistic capacity of human thought, its mythopoetic ability to apprehend the divine generosity in things—and by portraying it imaginatively and splendidly to allow its meaning and significance to be appreciated and celebrated and offered back to God in thanksgiving. Perhaps we could say that Lewis poses this question for us: would it be possible for modern, scientifically-minded people to rediscover within reality—by means of the thought experiment of imaginative, mythopoetic consideration—a meaning that seems addressed to us as a kind of communication, and not merely information that we possess and use exclusively for our own ends? It’s important to see that for Lewis reason itself cannot really be counted reasonable until and unless it is oriented towards and responsive to this deep objective reality at the heart of things. Throughout his 1944 work The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that the educational theory of his day dangerously inculcates an implicit assumption that our views of reality are almost always reducible to merely subjective causes within ourselves (our cultural upbringing or deeper still our bio-psychology, for example); by contrast, he insists, the nearly universal testimony of human wisdom has been that “certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind

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of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” and that this accord between our minds and the objective reality of things is what humankind has usually meant by reason and being reasonable.⁶ For our purposes it’s worth reminding ourselves that the accord between reality and our minds that Lewis ponders was for most of the history of Christian thought a direct implication of the divine ideas teaching—the same idea by which God holds each creature in being also actualizing the mind of a human knower according to that very idea, in order that the truth of each creature might be known. We can recall that for Lewis the discovery of this deep law at the heart of things, this “deeper magic” that really accounts for reason’s ability to arrive at intelligible understanding, is far from a merely neutral or pedantic fact—it is the very life-blood of reality and the motive of the mind’s journey. It is, in the lovely words from his great sermon “The Weight of Glory,” “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”⁷ Or, as he put it perhaps most famously in the mouth of Aslan, it is that deeper magic from before the dawn of time: Though the witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a deeper magic still which she did not know . . . . If she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.⁸

For Lewis, of course, this “deeper magic” is nothing less than the eternal wisdom of God’s own knowing and loving, which underlies all creaturely forms of existence and the observance of which alone can carry the mind towards the fullness of truth. As we know, reason has a history—or rather, humankind’s notions of what constitute reason have a history—now more visionary, now more reductionist, now more expansive, now more narrowly analytical understandings of what exactly we mean by reason. And Lewis was deeply concerned, not only that our notion of reason was becoming unnaturally constricted, incapable of sensing the mysterious presence of a depth in reality which it could not understand—but which earlier eras, for all that they knew reason could not grasp it, were content to wonder at in appreciation and humility. And it was precisely this wondering appreciation that Lewis thinks marked the healthy upward dynamic of reason and with which, he worries, his contemporaries are losing touch. The study of literature had led Lewis to conclude that the process of disenchantment not only divested

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the world of its deeper spiritual significance, but had simultaneously diminished the contemplative capacity of the human mind to recognize this manifestation of divine goodness in the world around us. At the outset, the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds, and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not end there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken . . . when we attributed “souls” or “selves” or minds to human organisms as when we attributed dryads to the trees . . . . We, who have personified all things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications . . . . And thus we arrived at a result uncommonly like zero. While we were reducing the world to almost nothing we deceived ourselves with the fancy that all its lost qualities were being kept safe (if in a somewhat humbled condition) as “things in our own mind.” Apparently we had no mind of the sort required.⁹

As Lewis humorously castigates the reductionist account of reality and its painful dénouement in reason’s own reduction to biological determinism, one can sense beneath the sardonic humor his despairing sense of loss over the world’s disenchantment and the crippling of the mind’s reach towards a vanishingly beautiful intelligibility. His own expertise as scholar of Renaissance literature led him towards a hunch, I believe, about a way forward for humanity’s calling as the reasoners of beauty. As he put it in “The Weight of Glory”: Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am, but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.¹⁰

What Lewis saw again and again in his literary studies was the ability of the human mind, by its imaginative powers, to set reason free from its

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reductionist narrowing, to push through the back of the wardrobe and catch a glimpse of the deeper magic which was always there all along in the most ordinary things. My suggestion is that this mythopoetic gaze is a kind of cousin of the very best scientific imagination as well as the contemplative awareness of the world’s goodness. It invites, or could invite, both scientific reasoning and the contemplative gaze not to divorce their awareness of deep underlying formulae for things from their beauty as that radiant intelligibility which illuminates the minds that seek to understand them and beholds them in awed wonder. What makes Lewis’ reflections on myth and the human artistic imagination so suggestive, I think, is his concern not to “magic” away the actual scientific and objective reality of things but rather to re-envisage it in a way that recalls the beholder to the deep and powerful beauty of this reality, precisely because it shimmers—like a word of intelligent speech or an intelligible sign of communication—with a meaning from beyond itself, a meaning that overflows it in the way that words taken up into a conversation overflow with meaning and intentions beyond their spare individual connotations. We may even compare Lewis’ view with a sacramental vision articulated very well by Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142): For this whole sensible world is a kind of book written by the finger of God, that is created by divine power, and each creature is a kind of figure, not invented by human determination, but established by the divine will to manifest and in some way signify the invisible wisdom of God. However, just as when an unlettered person sees an open book and notices the shapes but does not recognise the letters, so stupid and carnal people, who are not aware of the things of God, see on the outside the beauty in these visible creatures, but they do not understand its meaning. On the other hand, a spiritual person can discern all things. When he considers externally the beauty of the work, he understands internally how wondrous is the wisdom of the Creator.¹¹

The aim for Hugh was to “journey through the world as a symbolic universe, from that which was known and visible, to that which was beyond knowledge and the human mind.”¹² For Lewis as for Hugh, the problem was that it is easy enough to grasp the physical and scientific sub-structure of a thing, and miss its beauty as an element in a conversation. What human capacity could recover a living sense of the communicative significance of things, resonant with a meaning and a beauty that is made possible by their

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scientifically-discerned structures but not exhaustively reducible to them? Lewis is concerned precisely to recover this wonder and strangeness of the hidden objective powers of things. Commenting on his childhood progression from juvenile poetry to greater works, he says it was as if a cupboard which one had hitherto valued as a place for hanging coats proved one day, when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides: as if a food one had enjoyed for the taste proved one day to enable you (like dragon’s blood) to understand the speech of birds; as if water, besides quenching thirst, suddenly became an intoxicant.¹³

Like Bacon and Newton (who both investigated alchemical processes in hopes of finding the secret and commanding names of things), Lewis evokes here a parallel process into which great poetry had initiated him: the power of a profoundly imaginative vision to disclose hitherto undreamt of properties in even the most familiar and seemingly ordinary things. The problem, Lewis believed, was that the reductive scientific account of reality was so powerfully successful that later modernity’s mourning over the disenchantment of the world could easily seem to be merely a self-indulgent species of nostalgia. Yet, as we briefly noted in Chapter 2, the original analysis of things offered by the new science had been twinned with a wondering reverence for the power of the “Maker’s forms” (in Bacon’s terms) not only to command nature for human benefit but indeed to signify the “Maker” as meaning-giver, communicator. And this is why Hugh of St. Victor’s analogy between the creatures and lettered writing is so telling: being able to reduce the creatures to the letters that compose them, their sub-phenomenal scientific formulae, for example, need not exclude the further possibility that, for those who can read, the letters combine in different ways that become words and intelligent speech. Indeed, that is the “deep magic” of them—not something aside from or instead of their scientific sub-structure, but rather a further significance inherent in that very structure when it is conceived as an act of meaningful communication. Suddenly the wardrobe, precisely as a wardrobe, is also the threshold into the Hesperides. Whether Lewis knew directly of Hugh of St. Victor’s analogy, he certainly delighted in the rich medieval metaphor of the world as a book. And he clearly longed to awaken his contemporaries to this hidden but overlooked significance in all things. In his novel The Silver Chair (one of his Narnia stories), Lewis sends his protagonists clambering through a bewildering landscape. After awakening from their exhaustion

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and confusion, they look back and suddenly realize that the bizarre geography they had traversed was actually the overgrown ruins of ancient letters that spelled the very message and sign they had been looking for but failed to recognize. By playfully literalizing the metaphor of the world as intelligent speech, Lewis entices us to wonder what deep meanings within the world we have allowed to fall into ruins of un-recognized significance. What Lewis explored so keenly, perhaps every bit as well in his scholarly and critical writings as in his well-known fictional works, is the power of the human mythopoetic imagination to re-kindle our living awareness of this deep and mysterious communicativeness in things—not at the expense of their scientific analysis, but as a supremely human milieu for that scientific project. Lewis wants us to notice the difference between an authentically visionary imagination and the disenchanted literary mind that avidly confects self-gratifying and self-preoccupying fantasies. In an essay from 1952, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” Lewis distinguishes between the kind of children’s stories that are dubbed realistic and are really compensatory fantasies of success with the in-crowd at school or on realistic adventures, and “is all flattery to the ego . . . and sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented”; by contrast, real fairy tales arouse a child to a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise the real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story [of the “realistic” kind] desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.¹⁴

Again, we can note the important feature here, that the “real woods” are not less real, less susceptible of real scientific understanding, but they are by the imaginative capacity to re-conceive them, also “a little enchanted,” mysteriously imbued with more significance than before. My suggestion here is that this mythic awakening to something more at the heart of things is at least a helpful analogy, perhaps even a bridge, towards the notion that in contemplation human beings are drawn into an awareness of the eternal knowing and loving, communicating itself at the heart of everything.

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Lewis’ works record his own hope that a genuinely mythopoetic vision might draw humankind into a communion of receptivity and thanksgiving, receiving and beholding the beauty of creation and conceiving the hidden significance of its giftedness in wonder. When the last books of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings finally made their appearance in print, Lewis wrote a searching review of the whole work. The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity.” The boy enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat . . . . By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in the mind, the real things are more themselves. This book [The Lord of the Rings] applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless peril, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.¹⁵

For Lewis, then, a mythopoetic imagination enlarges our experience of reality, permitting at least a hint of what it would be like to experience a communicative depth in all things. It is of course far beyond my competence to assess whether something like this might afford our present cultural imaginary, immured within its “immanent frame” (in Taylor’s words), an opening towards transcendent meaning. Nonetheless I do wonder whether the confluence of our desperate need to conceive our relationship to the natural world in profoundly new ways, our longing for spiritual significance and meaning in our current everyday lives, and indeed even our present-day fascination with the wide range of fantasy literatures, might together suggest at least the possibility of an opening in our current plausibility structures— allowing us to imagine the world and our interaction with it as part of a vast and transformative conversation that reaches beyond exclusively human meaning and conventions. If we were for the sake of argument to entertain such a possibility we would very quickly find points of contact in the Christian tradition: ways of encountering reality that emphasize the contemplative awareness that the world is indeed a kind of speech event, a communication, or as Hugh of St. Victor put it a book written by the finger of God. One of the most important witnesses to this tradition is Maximus the Confessor, who understands God’s

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self-communication or Word to be continuously expressing itself in and as the creation; or as Maximus puts it, the Word “always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment.”¹⁶ In an important study of this theme in Maximus, Blowers comments: In the broader framework of Maximus’ “Logology,” as we might call it, the Word alone enjoys the pure freedom to inscribe or incarnate himself in any and all “holy texts,” whether the text be creation, Scripture, flesh, the scripts of virtuous conduct, or even human writings striving to emulate and transmit the sanctity and wisdom of the Logos.¹⁷

For our purposes it is particularly notable how richly the divine ideas tradition resources Maximus’ account; the Word or Logos who bears within himself the ideas or logoi of every creature expresses or embodies himself in each creature’s particularity, so that we might imagine the individuality of each creature as a letter in the larger communication that God is making in and to the created order: . . . the Logos “becomes thick” in the sense that for our sake He ineffably concealed Himself in the logoi of beings, and is obliquely signified in proportion to each visible thing, as if through certain letters, being whole in whole things while simultaneously remaining utterly complete and fully present, whole, and undifferentiated in each particular thing.¹⁸

Maximus’ wondering joy at the presence of God’s self-communication in and as every creature arouses a parallel concern that the rational creature, humanity, who is especially tasked with the vocation to recognize and respond to the divine speech, has failed in our calling. Augustine’s diagnosis of this failure is directly related to our inability to contemplate the whole of reality as it is in God’s knowing and loving. What happens is that the soul, loving its own power, slides away from the whole which is common to all into the part which is its own private property. By following God’s directions and being perfectly governed by his laws it could enjoy the whole universe of creation; but by the apostasy of pride which is called the beginning of sin it strives to grab something more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws; and because there is nothing more than the whole it is thrust back into anxiety over a part, and so by being greedy for more it gets less.¹⁹

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In this remarkable passage, Augustine deploys the narrative frame of Genesis 3 as a way of interpreting the common plight of humanity. Delusion and anxiety mark the distortion of human consciousness as it falls into sin: with minds set on the things that are above, that is on God’s meaning and intention for all things, humankind would have shared in the universal generosity of divine goodness present everywhere. The human mind would have understood itself as always and everywhere a participant in that universal outpouring of goodness. Sin in Genesis 3 infects human consciousness with a fear of deprivation, an anxious need to possess more and more for oneself—as though all things were not already shared with an infinite outpouring of goodness. And the result of this deluded consciousness is a rupture between the human mind and the divine ideas, the generous truth of all things, so that humankind obsessively apprehends less and less reality. It is helpful to confirm Augustine’s discussion by contrasting it with the gift of loving intimacy that Aquinas holds out as the fulfillment of healthy human consciousness. Indeed Thomas regards this possibility of a transformed consciousness as the fulfillment of our human longing to understand reality through union with God’s own knowing and loving: “ . . . to know in themselves the very things we believe, by a kind of union with them, belongs to the gift of wisdom. Therefore, the gift of wisdom corresponds more closely to charity which unites man’s mind to God.”²⁰ Again the point here is to emphasize the significance within the divine ideas tradition of this profound hope, namely that God would fulfill the human vocation as rational creatures by permitting a participative knowing, grounded in God’s own knowing of all things. Eriugena elucidates the divine self-communication, access to which humanity has lost, and reminds his readers of what might yet be perceived: “The light of divine knowledge left the world when man deserted God. In two ways, therefore, the eternal light makes himself known to the world, by Scripture and by what is created . . . . Look with the bodily sense at the forms and beauty of sensible things: in them you will perceive the Word of God.”²¹ In order to explore this notion more fully, Eriugena speaks of multiple worlds, for example the spiritual realm, in which dwell the eternal reasons and the angels who contemplate them, and a second world of sensible reality that at first might seem removed or divorced from the first world of spiritual and intelligible reality. But Eriugena assures us that this is not the case. Of the second world, Eriugena remarks: “Although it is at the lowest level of the universe, the Word was in it and through the Word it was made. It is the first

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step for those who wish to ascend to the knowledge of truth through the senses, for the spectacle of visible things draws the reasoning mind to the knowledge of invisible things.”²² Eriugena highlights the significance of the ancient notion of humanity as the microcosm of the universe in which both the material and the spiritual realms are present together. This is crucial for Eriugena because of the particular role, in his view, that humanity must play in restoring all things to unity in God. “The body possesses all corporeal, but the soul possesses all spiritual, nature; these, brought together in one joining, constitute the whole harmony that is man. And so man is called ‘all,’ for every creature is amalgamated in him as in a workshop.”²³ Unfortunately, says Eriugena, the Fall renders human consciousness severely weakened in its capacities and distorted in its attention: “This world, then, that is, man, did not know his Creator; nor, held by the bonds of carnal thoughts, did he wish to know his God through either the symbols of the written Law or the signs of the visible creation.”²⁴ Our writers tend to hold very dearly this contemplative reverence for the divine ideas, the Maker’s meaning, as manifest in “the signs of the visible creation.” We can perhaps more readily imagine something of this reverence if we were to liken it to our own concern to protect the natural world from the depredations and degradations inflicted on it by human greed and heedless unawareness; in such ways, we might think, humans do indeed fail to regard and revere the intrinsic worth and meaning of the creatures. Or think moreover of the irreparable damage inflicted by racism in its incorrigible misperception, denial, and distortion of human truth. For our thinkers, such a failure imperils our fellow human beings and the whole created order, precisely because it abdicates our own divinely-given responsibility to recognize and honor the deep truth of each creature. Bonaventure reflects on this plight and the world’s need for God’s response: It is certain that as long as humanity stood upright, humans possessed the knowledge of created things, and through their significance, they were carried up to God; to praise, worship, and love God. This is the purpose of creation, and this is how creation is led back to God. But after the Fall, this knowledge was lost, and there was no longer anyone to lead creatures back to God. Therefore, this book – the world – became dead and illegible. And another book was needed through which this one would be lighted up, so that it could receive the symbolic meaning of created things. This book is the book of Scripture which establishes the likenesses, the properties, and the symbolic meaning of those things written down in the book of the world.²⁵

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Bonaventure points movingly to the authentic communicativeness that echoes at creation’s depth—every creature an embodied word in the great conversation and communion into which the Trinity invites the whole created universe. In this view, the communicativeness of creatures (the embodied expression of their divine meaning and ideas) is silenced by a human failure to recognize and respect the divine speaking in each creature—and so “there was no longer anyone to lead creatures back to God.” Notice here that for Bonaventure, and the whole tradition he represents, the contemplation by rational beings of God’s ideas embodied by each creature crucially raises to intelligible articulation the creature’s meaning and value, the inextinguishable fact of its eternal truth in God. Bonaventure thus describes the book of Scripture as a corrective, renewing the human capacity to hear the echo of the Word in the divine ideas embodied within the pages of “the book of the world”—especially as God’s Word expresses the divine meaning in the narrative of God’s people Israel and in the flesh of Christ. It may be important to conclude this section by reminding ourselves of an important caveat: to read the creatures as inherently symbolic, that is, as the expression of divine self-communication, must not lead to any undermining or diminishment of their full reality as embodied beings—rather it is this very embodied particularity of each creature that grounds its meaning. The contemplative ascent to which humankind is invited, by the very symbolic structure of the universe in which we exist, comes to fulfillment not by abandoning the reality of the physical creation but rather by a transformation in the human act of knowing. Eric Perl commenting on the approach to this question in Pseudo-Dionysius, offers a particularly lucid account of the issues: In this ascent, the sensible symbols are not merely left behind. For the very nature of a symbol is such that to know it is to unknow it . . . . To a person who cannot read, for example, a written word is an object consisting of ink on paper. But a reader, in the very act of perceiving the word, is oblivious to the word as such and attentive only to its meaning. The more he ignores the word as an object, the more deeply immersed he is in the meaning, the more perfectly he is reading and the better he is knowing the word as what it really is, as a symbol. The non-reader might argue that the reader is simply disregarding the word in favor of something else; this is precisely the attitude of those who see in the Dionysian ascent from sensible symbols to intellectual contemplation to mystical unknowing a rejection or

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abandonment of sense and symbol. But in fact, of course, it is the reader, who in perceiving the word unknows it in itself, who truly knows and appreciates the word as word.²⁶

This discussion of the human contemplative calling clearly draws on the insights we noted above in the passage from Hugh of St. Victor. But let us explore more thoroughly this metaphor of regarding the world from the vantage point of one who is unable to read as compared with the perspective of one who is able to read. Notice the emphasis on the fact that we are regarding precisely the same realities of creaturely existence but from two different perspectives. This points us to a crucial realization, namely that we are not speaking of a material, physical universe that is separate from and a mere shadow of a more vibrantly real, intelligible, or spiritual universe; rather we are speaking of one integral reality which when regarded from the “illiterate” perspective can only be perceived in terms of the slow discursive apprehension of individual objects that may be regarded as the sum of the physical world, but the same reality regarded from the “literate” perspective opens the seeming objects of the physical world to a depth of significance and vibrant reality that betokens meaningful communication in and through the very embodied reality of the world. It is so important to see this because it releases us from the ages-long suspicion that a Christian Platonic vision of reality, such as the divine ideas teaching resources, necessarily implies a denigration or abandonment of the material physical reality of the world. The analogy between this literate reading of the world and the transformation of consciousness that Christian contemplation implies draws us to wonder about the source and ground of such a transformation—a source I will seek to identify below as the resurrection of Christ. The question such analogies put to us in our present day is simply this: might we once more plausibly imagine the universe as a kind of speech event, and if so what would be the particular role of human beings in such a universe?

The Contemplative Calling of Creation In the sections above I have suggested how it might be possible to reconceive the universe as we experience it in our own day as an act of communication. At the scientific level we might think of the communication which goes on among all molecular structures, organisms, and species in order for the world to persist; but at a deeper level we might think of the meaning one

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would find in an act of intelligent speech, a communication event in which the universe is not only the means of communication but is invited to fulfill itself—precisely by being drawn into the very source and ground of that communication in God. In order to help unfold the interior logic of this position, I am going to distinguish, somewhat artificially, four discrete notions held by almost all exponents of the divine ideas teaching. And while I hope that setting them forth in this pattern will assist us in understanding, in reality our thinkers hold all these notions together in one intuitive vision. First, there is the notion, already explored above, that the universe is indeed resonant with divine speech and therefore calls forth hearers of the Word, partners in the deepening conversation into which God continually invites all creatures. Second, this means that rational creatures capable of noticing and responding to the divine invitation to communication at the heart of all things have a very particular role to play; and this is especially true of humankind in virtue of the fact that the divine Word has taken humanity into personal unity in the Incarnation. Third, our thinkers explore this contemplative calling, particularly the way in which it draws the sensible or material creation towards a kind of fulfillment, as the creatures are heard and appreciated as “speech events” in the minds of their fellow creatures; importantly, this contemplative return of creation towards its intelligible reality within the divine knowing and loving does not imply an abandonment or denigration of the physical embodiment of the creatures, but rather a shift in the consciousness of those who “hear” their fellow creatures. Fourth, our thinkers understand the Incarnation, Paschal mystery, and outpouring of the Holy Spirit as in fact the constitutive ground of creation’s contemplative calling. At the risk of getting well ahead of myself, and because this fourth point is in fact the ground of all the others, let me develop it here a bit further. I’m suggesting that the human contemplative calling is a profoundly natural aspect of human existence, but that it has been transfigured, and its fundamental roots within the Trinitarian life of God revealed, by the resurrection of Christ. What do I mean by this? In the sections above I have spoken of Christian contemplation as implying a transformation in the consciousness of the one who contemplates—enabling one to regard the same reality from a fundamentally different perspective. The resurrection of Jesus, I want to argue, is the projection within the broken reality of our world of the Father’s inexhaustible knowing of the truth of

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Godself; it is the instantiation in our world of the true Word that Jesus has embodied in all that he is. From the vantage point of our broken world, shrouding human consciousness by the fear and antagonism of sin, the resurrection of Christ is indecipherable: Jesus’ mission has been a failure and his meaning has been defined by worldly authorities as blasphemous and duly subject to the final silencing of meaning that is his painful suffering and death. From this perspective Jesus is simply another object caught within the violent structures of the world’s consciousness, which is driven by terrible deprivation, rivalry, cruelty, and the apparent ultimacy of power. Christians believe, however, that by the power of the Holy Spirit they have been drawn into the Father’s knowing of Godself, manifested in our world as God’s knowing and vindicating of the Word by raising him from the dead; and thus they have come to see that the crucified and suffering human being they have known and loved as Jesus is in fact inexhaustibly alive, with a life over which death has no dominion—in other words their vision has been informed by God’s own self-understanding, and this is what it means to encounter the risen Christ. This transformation of consciousness (engendered by Christ’s resurrection), I am suggesting, is in fact the very ground and source of the transformation of consciousness that comes as a gift in Christian contemplation. And, importantly, it does not imply in any way a leaving behind or denigration of the physical reality of the body of Christ, or indeed of any earthly material reality, but rather a new perception of this reality as itself a sign of an infinite and inexhaustible meaning. Empowered by God’s love and delight, the Holy Spirit, Christians believe they are enabled to regard things no longer according to the vision that sees them merely as objects caught in the broken structures of the world, but according to the Father’s eternal knowing of them, that is their archetypal truth. This is perhaps suggested by such important passages as Paul’s reflection on the new understanding of reality granted in and by the community’s encounter with the risen Christ. For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Cor. 5:14–17)

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It’s worthwhile elucidating the points Paul is making and drawing the connection with the argument I have been suggesting. First, note that it is the power of love, often understood by Paul as a gift poured into human hearts by the Holy Spirit, that makes possible the previously inconceivable new form of consciousness—love draws the mind onwards to what it cannot yet fully grasp (we might think here of the particularly important and formative encounters of the early followers of Jesus with his crucified and risen presence—encounters facilitated by love). Second, we note that the community, through baptism, is plunged into Christ’s death and resurrection; for Paul this implies a new communal identity for each person—no longer understanding oneself as one over against another but as inherently relational elements within the communion of love that the resurrection manifests and constitutes within the finite reality of this world. As a result, the community no longer regards others “from a human point of view,” that is no one, especially not even Christ, is regarded simply as an object within the play of the world’s power but rather as a new communication event, a new moment of encounter with creative love itself. This Paschal consciousness is, I believe, the source of Christianity’s transformation of the human contemplative calling. In what remains of this section, then, I want to set forth this vision of the contemplative calling according to the four distinct notions I have summarized above, always bearing in mind that this separating out and sequencing of the four aspects is merely an attempt to articulate the inner integrity of the positions held by these thinkers.

The World as Communication of the Word Throughout this book we have seen ample examples of the way in which Christian thinkers and mystical theologians have drawn, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, on the divine ideas teaching in order to underwrite their understanding of God’s presence at the heart of creation: the eternal Word, bearing within himself the exemplar reasons of all creatures, speaks continuously this deep truth at the ground of each creature— and this divine communication evokes a response within creation itself. Meister Eckhart expresses this understanding of creation as theophany with characteristic verve: All creatures want to utter God in all their works; they all come as close as they can in uttering him, and yet they cannot utter him . . . . The Father

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speaks the Son out of all his power, and he speaks in him all things. All created things are God’s speech. The being of a stone speaks and manifests the same as does my mouth about God . . . .²⁷

Though the creatures cannot adequately express God, says Eckhart, they are all “God’s speech,” because the Father speaks all things in the Word or Son. With refreshing daring, Eckhart declares that the sheer existence of a stone says as much about God as human beings can; and yet Eckhart agrees with most of this tradition in affirming that human consciousness may be called to a level of awareness of itself as divine speech that is not necessarily available to other creatures. For exponents of the divine ideas teaching, creation’s “word-fullness” flows directly from the Trinitarian self-communication of God’s eternal self-knowing. Indeed, it is because of the infinite beauty and expressivity of this divine activity at their heart that creatures are inspired to acknowledge and respond in some way to the inner meaning they find within themselves. In his lucid account of Bonaventure’s understanding of creation’s relation to the Incarnation of Christ, Zachary Hayes points to the fundamental exemplarity of the universe: The first and primal relation is that between the Father and the Word, and in it is contained the basis of all other relation. So it is that He who is the center of the divine life is also the exemplar of creation; and creation itself may be seen as an external word in which the one inner Word is objectified. If it is true that the triune God creates after His own Image, that is, after the Word, then it follows that any created reality will possess, in its inner constitution, a relation to this uncreated Word. In as far as the one Word is the expression of the entire inner-trinitarian structure of God, that which is created as an expression of the Word bears within itself the imprint of the Trinity.²⁸

For Bonaventure, then, the very “inner constitution” of created reality ceaselessly echoes the eternal expressivity of the Word, the intelligible beauty that awakens rational creatures’ desire to understand and to participate in the conversation God is creating. The divine self-communication radiates within each creature the form of its imperishable truth within the everlasting self-knowing of God. This is why the world is not only a speech-event but also arouses within itself a conversation partner: rational creatures continually drawn towards their fulfillment as hearers of the Word.

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We can easily see how this intelligible beauty or wisdom, radiating within creation, awakens fellow creatures to its contemplation and towards a yearning for ever deeper understanding: You never Enjoy the World aright, till you see how a Sand Exhibiteth the Wisdom and Power of God: And Prize in evry Thing the Service which they do you, by Manifesting His Glory and Goodness to your Soul, far more than the Visible Beauty on their Surface, or the Material Services, they can do your Body.²⁹

Few passages from the Anglican priest and poet Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) are better known and beloved than this evocation of the contemplation of God in nature. The delightful itinerary of human perception that Traherne proposes—from the tiny grain of sand to the immense, pervasive beauty of divine wisdom—lures the reader into cheerful amazement: even the tiniest things, if not eyed in a merely reductive or possessive way, can become thoughts that draw the mind up into joyful converse with that eternal goodness whence all things flow. So why are human beings called to recognize the invisible wisdom and power of God in the visible things God has made (Rom. 1:20)? Certainly for Traherne, as for the rest of the Christian tradition, the contemplation of God in nature is in part a preparation for the unmediated contemplation of God in heaven, and it is also of course an appropriate act of reverence and praise for the Creator on the part of the creatures. But even beyond this, as I hope to show, there is a sense in which it is also a drawing of creation onwards, almost eucharistically, into its full potential and meaning—as though the full truth of the creatures cannot be realized until the divine generosity and self-giving at their core become acknowledged and named, received and offered back in praise and thanksgiving to their Source. An acute observer of Traherne’s vision suggests something of the momentum behind the communicativeness of the world: “For Traherne, the world is so provided for human thought, so accommodating and companionable to human thought, that we fulfill its nature only in conceiving it.”³⁰ Perhaps we could think of the contemplative turn, evoked by the world’s “word-fullness,” as a vital renewal and refreshing of the primordial divine speaking at the heart of each creature; for when a human or angelic mind is actualized by thinking the intelligible form (or idea) of a thing, we could say that at this moment the created thing is restored to oneness—in and through the contemplative movement of the mind—with the divine idea by which the creature is spoken continuously

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into existence in the eternal Word. Now we can explore more fully this contemplative calling that the divine self-communication within all creation evokes.

The Particular Calling of Rational Creatures In a letter of 1494, Marsilio Ficino considers how, by God’s mercy, the words of a prophet who speaks of earthly things sometimes become filled with the divine power of the primordial Speaker, so that a creaturely thing named in human words becomes resonant again with the divine speaking and wisdom that is its creative ground. The distinguished Ficino scholar Michael Allen comments that here Ficino is pointing to the “ . . . interweaving of the Logos in the unfolding of the things of nature, the res creatae that depend for their very existence on the divine utterance.”³¹ My suggestion is that the contemplative’s beholding of God’s intelligible beauty in creatures is analogous to the prophet’s naming of God’s power in creatures; in both cases, the human mind (precisely by its intelligent apprehension of a creature) fosters a replenishing within the world of that ravishingly intelligible divine speaking by which the creature is and towards which it will be consummated. This contemplative turning or ascent of the mind—from the finite individual creature to the radiant fullness of the creature’s eternal archetype in the mind of God—might even be seen as a kind of momentum within finite existence and created time itself. Augustine, for example, perhaps with a kind of serious playfulness, imagines the gathering pendulum swing of time as coming into being precisely through the angelic contemplative turning from beholding the creatures in themselves to beholding them in their archetypal forms in God: The holy angels, whose equals we shall be after the resurrection, if to the end we hold to Christ our Way, always behold the face of God and rejoice in His Word, the only-begotten Son, equal to the Father; and in them first of all wisdom was created. They, therefore, without any doubt know all creation, of which they are the creatures first made, and they have this knowledge first in the Word of God Himself, in whom are the eternal reasons of all things made in time, existing in Him through whom all things have been created. And they have this knowledge in creation itself, as they look down upon it and refer it to the praise of Him in whose immutable truth they behold, as in the source of all creation, the reasons by

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which creatures have been made. There the knowledge they have is like day, and so that blessed company, perfectly united by participation in the same Truth, is the day first created; here among creatures their knowledge is like evening. But immediately morning comes (and this happens on all six days), because the knowledge angels have does not remain fixed in a creature without their immediately referring it to the praise and love of Him in whom they know not the fact, but the reason, for its creation.³²

It’s as if the angels’ referring their knowledge of the creatures to the praise and love of God is a kind of deep ordering rhythm building up the noetic patterns and structures of the world, structures that govern our perception of all things in their transience and their ultimacy, and so our perception of time itself. And Ficino clearly enjoys this possibility. Whenever we turn, he says (echoing Augustine), from thinking about reality by means of created things to the principles and causes of those things, then we have turned from knowledge that “ . . . is called by the theologians ‘evening’ knowledge” to what “is called ‘morning’ knowledge.”³³ Importantly, for Ficino, as for Traherne (and most of the Christian tradition prior to modernity), it is the radiance of the intelligible form that beckons the contemplative mind, and therefore it is the particular calling of human beings to awaken to the true meaning, the divine splendor, of that which is arousing them. Contemplation is the means by which the hidden divine beauty within creation can be recognized and acclaimed; it is the means by which creation continues its unfolding pilgrimage from “evening” knowledge to “morning” knowledge, from the night of this world to the light of everlasting day. Ficino and much of the tradition follow Augustine in pondering the contemplative role of the angels, bearing within their understanding this unifying relation between the intelligible form of creatures in their finite existence and their eternal exemplar within God. Yet Eriugena, while emphasizing this theme from Augustine, is sufficiently influenced by his study of Maximus the Confessor to identify humankind as the medium whom God calls to hold together within human consciousness the primordial truth of all creatures and their earthly expression. Thus, humanity is assigned the role of mediator between the material world and its fullness of reality in God. Eriugena writes: . . . man was made among the primordial causes in the image of God; that in him every creature, both intelligible and sensible, of which he is composed, as of various extremes, should become an inseparable unity, and

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that he should be the mediating term and unification of all creatures. For there is no creature that cannot be understood (to be) in man . . . ³⁴

Eriugena goes on to say that had it not been for the shadowing of human consciousness occasioned by the Fall, human understanding would hold together in inseparable unity the earth with paradise; indeed he argues that it is a fundamental goal of the human contemplative calling to reunite the creation by restoring human consciousness to its participation in the divine knowing and loving at the ground of all creatures. We can clarify the theological rationale for this perspective by analyzing how Thomas Aquinas conceives the role of rational creatures in the production and perfecting of the universe by God. It’s highly significant that as he invites his readers to consider the particular role of rational creatures— namely their ability to hold creation within their own minds as intelligible reality—he is always directing our gaze “back” into the act of the divine intellect (in knowing and creating all things through the divine ideas) and “onwards” into the beatific state in which the rational creature comes to know all things by a full participation in God’s own knowing and loving of them. By causing his readers continually to consider their own act of understanding in terms of its primordial ground and its ultimate consummation, perhaps we could say that Thomas is inviting humankind to consider its contemplative calling as a mysteriously collaborative element within the divine procession and return of all creaturely reality. Thomas begins with two important preparatory steps. First he elicits our awareness that the creation reflects and expresses the divine wisdom, and that by meditating upon the creatures we become aware of this wisdom (“wisdom” in our authors names the unified totality of the divine ideas). Next Thomas advances our thoughts by reframing this sense of the created reflection of wisdom in terms of a direct divine communication of God’s likeness in and as the creatures: “ . . . meditation on His works enables us in some measure to admire and reflect upon His wisdom . . . . Hence, from reflection upon God’s works we are able to infer His wisdom, since, by a certain communication of His likeness, it is spread abroad in the things He has made.”³⁵ Thus we can see how Thomas, with serene attentiveness, directs the contemplative gaze to the integrity between the divine ideas in the eternal creative wisdom of God and their expressive presence in and as all creatures. Alluding to the attractive power of God’s goodness, Thomas goes on to add, “If, therefore, the goodness, beauty, and delightfulness of creatures are

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so alluring to the minds of men, the fountainhead of God’s own goodness, compared with the rivulets of goodness found in creatures, will draw the enkindled minds of men wholly to Itself.”³⁶ Here we can see how Thomas develops a deeper awareness within human contemplatives of the divine ground that awakens their calling. He arouses us to wonder at the beauty we see around us, but only to make us wonder all the more at its inexhaustible ground in God. And once awakened to that supereminent beauty, Thomas has, as it were, initiated human beings into the motivating force of their contemplative calling. Now Thomas makes an even bolder move: from drawing our attention to the divine beauty, he draws us further into the divine act of self-knowing— precisely because our ability as rational creatures to hold other beings in our minds, according to their intelligible forms, is what permits us to instantiate a likeness of God within the created order: “ . . . by knowing himself, God beholds all other things in Himself. Since, then, the Christian faith teaches man principally about God, and makes him know creatures by the light of divine revelation, there arises in man a certain likeness of God’s wisdom.”³⁷ We should notice here the important implicit role of the divine ideas in linking the divine act of self-knowing with the role of human knowers. Thomas begins by reminding his readers that God knows all things in knowing Godself; and it is this divine self-knowing that human beings are drawn to share in by means of faith. Faith, in other words, is God’s way of sharing God’s self-knowing—and therefore the knowledge of all that is in the divine ideas—with human beings. As Thomas puts it, faith allows humankind to “know creatures by the light of divine revelation”; thus as human beings are invited to share in God’s own way of knowing and loving all creatures, God brings about within the created order a “certain likeness of God’s wisdom.” But why is this “likeness” of God within creation so significant? Is it simply for the benefit of human beings? Not at all, suggests Thomas. In fact the role of human beings in sharing in the divine ideas is for the benefit of the whole universe, that is, it is a way of enhancing the whole universe’s likeness to God (or as Eriugena or Bonaventure would say, it is a way of drawing the whole universe towards its consummation in God). Now, the perfection of the universe of creatures consists in its likeness to God . . . . But the form through which God produces the creature is an intelligible form in Him, since, as we have shown above, God is an intellectual agent. Therefore, the highest perfection of the universe

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demands the existence of some creatures in which the form of the divine intellect is represented according to intelligible being; that is to say, it requires the existence of creatures of an intellectual nature.³⁸

Thus, rational creatures, such as angels and human beings, have a particular role in drawing the whole created order towards its fulfillment, that is, its ever-increasing likening to God. Creatures exist as divine ideas within the mind of God, and wonderfully echoing that intimacy, creatures also exist as ideas—that is, their intelligible forms exist—within the minds of those who know them on earth. Once again, we can see here the role of the divine ideas teaching in fostering a profound sense of intimacy or communion between the creatures and the creator. For Thomas the imitation of God in the human mind’s knowing of the creatures (by means of the “light” of their intelligible forms or ideas) only very rarely in this life affords a glimpse of the divine ideas as direct objects of human thought. Only the blessed in heaven, says Thomas, enjoy a regular perception of the divine ideas themselves—as opposed to our normal human mode of abstracting intelligible forms of creatures from our sense experience of them. In the passages that we have been investigating just above, our authors are very consciously exploring the analogy between ideas in divine mind and ideas in the human or angelic mind—and they are exploring these analogies specifically within the context of a discussion of creation. But what significance might these analogies have more broadly, or indeed if we were to reflect upon them in the context of creaturely destiny or eschatology? Certainly, our authors are profoundly hopeful about the fact that rational creatures can, in the act of understanding, raise the sensible elements of creation to their intelligible forms, and therefore to a greater likeness to their existence in God. For exponents of the divine ideas teaching, this fact connects directly to the belief that God has created the universe by imbuing it with a dynamic yearning towards its own fulfillment in God. So, for example, Thomas keenly explores the significance of the human capacity to draw our fellow creatures towards their noblest state, i.e., their primordial existence as an intelligible reality that is in fact God’s own being: But in those things which have knowledge, each one is determined to its own natural being by its natural form, in such a manner that it is nevertheless receptive of the species of other things: for example, sense

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receives the species of all things sensible, and the intellect, of all things intelligible, so that the soul of man is, in a way, all things by sense and intellect: and thereby, those things that have knowledge, in a way, approach to a likeness to God, “in Whom all things pre-exist,” as Dionysius says.³⁹

Notice how Thomas guides our attention step-by-step: look at how the world is ordered by God, he says, and behold the fact that rational creatures are endowed with the capacity to draw their fellow beings towards a form of existence that ever increasingly echoes their existence in God. The human soul contemplates a tree, let us say, and in that activity the sensible form of the tree becomes present in the human knower (the lovely green moss on the bark becomes present within the senses of the human contemplative as sense impressions or sensible forms); and analogously the wonderfully robust “oakiness” of the tree becomes radiantly present within the mind of the contemplative as the very intelligibility of the oak tree. Thus says Thomas, the soul of the human contemplative is “in a way, all things by sense and intellect,” and in virtue of this fact, Thomas thinks, there is a likening or communion between earth and heaven, between the contemplative consciousness of earthly reality and the divine consciousness of reality in God. For some exponents of the divine ideas teaching, particularly for example Maximus and Eriugena, this capacity of the human contemplative to draw the creation towards a greater likening or even communion with its divine exemplar is a fundamental element in the return and restoration of creation to its harmony in God. In his account of Bonaventure’s understanding of this particular calling of the human, Zachary Hayes helpfully foregrounds the awakening of creation, in the form of human self-awareness, to its eternal ground and meaning within the Trinity. Man appears, then, as a finite being in whom the inner structural law of reality is to find personal expression; he is the consciousness of the world and the point at which the inner light of spiritual being will lighten the opaqueness of the world from within; for here the world, which is objectively the reflection of the Word and the Trinity, opens the eye of conscious awareness to its own structure so that the light of the eternal Word can become the light in which the world-in-man can see its own deepest truth . . . . In the image, the objective self-expression of God is called to turn back to God subjectively.⁴⁰

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I find Hayes’ account particularly helpful because it draws together three crucial elements: humanity’s role as member of the created order—a role that emphasizes the inherent contemplative dynamic or calling within all creatures; second, the fact that this deepening understanding of the inner truth at the heart of every creature is in fact an aspect of the created order’s own transformation of consciousness, as that develops within humankind; and finally, this transformation is unveiled as in fact an ever intensifying intimacy between created reality and its inner truth, who is the Word.

The Contemplative Return of Creation and Transformation of Consciousness So far I have been arguing that the wisdom and love that God communicates as the very heart of every creature are so luminous as to awaken a response from within creation, and that the rational creatures have a particular role to play in this deepening consciousness and communion with the divine knowing and loving. I have suggested that we might, preliminarily, think of this contemplative consciousness as drawing creation towards a replenishment of God’s truth and beauty within it, or as a kind of offering that creates a deeper level of communion among the creatures and with God. But how do our thinkers try to understand this possibility? Contemplation is a transformative act of the mind, and it would be fair to say that virtually all our exponents of the divine ideas tradition share, in various forms, a common understanding about the process of human cognition. Just to remind ourselves of this, the process begins as the bodily sensible form of a creature creates an impression within the senses of a rational knower; from this impression the mind delineates or abstracts the intelligible form, that is the idea by which the mind is actualized (thinks) and comes to know the reality it perceives. And our thinkers share a fairly wide range of views about the precise manner in which the eternal archetypes or reasons in the mind of God illuminate this process of discovering the intelligibility of the world around us: for some, this light of the mind naturally inheres in the rational creature, but for others the light of the eternal reasons is a continuous and direct divine illumination of the mind— analogous to the continuous gift of existence at the heart of each creature. But for all our thinkers the crucial element in the contemplative offering of creation is the transition in angelic or human consciousness: from the

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sensible apprehension of a fellow creature’s material embodiment to the recognition and understanding of its intelligible form. Now I want to argue that this contemplative transition, from a consciousness absorbed by the physical expression of a fellow creature to a consciousness open to the creature’s intelligibility, does not imply an abandonment or denigration of creaturely bodiliness. Consider a simple analogy: on a table before you rest a plate of food and cup of drink; if you were to consider these more and more narrowly within the ambit of their physical constituents, you might think of them in terms of nutritional value, perhaps, and then yet more deeply within their physical being as composites of various molecular structures. But now consider the plate of food and cup of drink at higher levels of their possible meaning or intelligibility within your consciousness of them as a rational creature: from this vantage point you might recognize them as the expression of a friend’s intention to create a meal for you, moreover this transition to their meaning or intelligibility might ascend further, so that you recognize in them an act of communion, a means of sharing in deep friendship—indeed in this form of consciousness you might, as it were, hold your meal with your friend open to a yet more transcendent gift of communion, an echo of the Eucharist itself. It’s important to note that the understanding of the creaturely reality from within the perspective of these higher levels of consciousness in no way reduces their bodiliness nor the physical gift of nourishment they afford; rather their bodily aspects, now understood from a consciousness of their intelligibility, become all the richer and more redolent of a plenitude of meaning and generosity—we could say they are more abundantly food than ever. I want to argue that it is something like this ascending mode of consciousness that exponents of the divine ideas tradition believe is at work in the contemplation of God’s knowing and loving within creation. If bodiliness is in fact the communication of meaning, then a contemplative consciousness that no longer perceives a creature’s bodiliness exclusively from within the individualized and isolated ambit of its material substructure, but which instead recognizes in that very bodiliness higher and higher levels of communicative intelligibility—this would be a contemplative consciousness that embraces a creature’s bodiliness within the divine wisdom and love from which it flows. Do we find anything like this kind of thinking among some of our divine ideas teachers? Why do they believe that such a contemplative ascent, an imitation of the angelic “turning” from the mundane existence of the creatures to their eternal ideas in God, would carry such significance?

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Maximus discusses precisely this notion of the human calling, and understands the contemplation of the ideas or logoi as a crucial step in the reuniting of the creation that sin has divided. Because the human being can hold together within ourselves both the sensible impression of the creatures and also their intelligible reality—which for Maximus is always an expression in time of the eternal Logos—humanity is able to restore creation’s wholeness: By uniting the intellectual and sensual realities with each other in knowledge equal to that of the angels, the human being makes the whole of creation one creation undivided for himself into what is known and what is unknown, for his knowledge-filled understanding of the logoi of beings becomes perfectly equal to the understanding of the angels.⁴¹

As Hayes commented just above on Bonaventure, for exponents of the divine ideas teaching such as Maximus and Bonaventure, humanity represents the created order come to self-consciousness. This permits a consciousness capable of conceiving the integrity of creation, and thus also its power to express the divine Wisdom. We can see many examples of this human role throughout the divine ideas tradition. Consider this example from Thomas Traherne: The Services of Things and their Excellencies are Spiritual: being Objects not of the Ey, but of the Mind: And you more Spiritual by how much more you Esteem them. Pigs eat Acorns, but neither consider the Sun that gav them Life, nor the Influences of the Heavens by which they were Nourished, nor the very Root of the Tree from whence they came. This being the Work of Angels Who in a Wide and Clear Light see even the Sea that gave them Moysture. And feed upon that Acorn Spiritualy, while they Know the Ends for which it was Created and feast upon all these, as upon a World of Joys within it: while to Ignorant Swine that eat the Shell, it is an Empty Husk of no Taste nor Delightfull Savor.⁴²

Traherne carefully guides the mind along the contemplative itinerary, teaching his readers to journey with the angels up through the materiality of the tiny acorn and so at last into the divine bounty and beauty that is the real core of the creaturely acorn. In this way one comes to feast “upon a World of Joys” hidden within the acorn, and thus Traherne would have us make present within the world, through this contemplative replenishing and

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refreshing, an influx of the primordial generosity of God. I’m suggesting, then, that this contemplative turn might be seen as a likening of the creature to its consummate existence, its archetypal being in its creative or exemplar idea in the eternal Word. Traherne’s chief concern is to renew this contemplative delighting in the divine presence in all things, and so, reciprocally, to realize the truth of all things in God. The point, he writes, is not what objects are before us, but “ . . . with what eyes we beheld them, with what affections we esteemed them.” Traherne teaches us to become aware of the level of contemplative consciousness we are engaging by contrasting the “swinish” consciousness—obsessively groping within an object’s most immediately graspable benefits—with the angelic consciousness that apprehends an object’s true meaning and reality within God. As he puts it very plainly: All men see the same objects, but do not equally understand them. Intelligence is the tongue that discerns and tastes them, Knowledge is the Light of Heaven, Love is the Wisdom and Glory of God, Life extended to all objects is the sense that enjoys them . . . . All objects are in God Eternal: which we by perfecting our faculties are made to enjoy.⁴³

Tasting the divine goodness in all things with the tongue of the mind, says Traherne, is the way to make real in them here and now something of the full savor of their archetypal reality in the mind of God. Notice, moreover, his important claim that “all objects are in God eternal”: this observation exhibits very clearly how the contemplative consciousness overcomes the supposed dualism of matter and spirit, so that the embodied physicality of a creature is no longer isolated from its expressive intelligibility in the self-communication of God. As the “very life of the creature itself,” the divine idea of the creature existing eternally in the Word bears within itself the authoring power, the agential beauty, that is the real meaning of the creature’s mundane existence. And in a world where the truth and significance of creatures is so often distorted and indeed mortally wounded by sin, the contemplative “re-cognition” of this truth becomes of life-changing significance. So perhaps we could understand the real meaning of the contemplative turn in this way: as the work of human consciousness, holding up into prayerful offering the mystical truth of the creature, re-uniting it with its overflowing creative agency within the Word. It is thought-provoking to see C. S. Lewis, an eminent scholar of Renaissance literature after all, noticing in Traherne

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something very like this capacity of contemplative mind and its responsibility within the created order: Remember too what Traherne says, that our appreciation of the world – which becomes fully conscious only as we express it in art—is a real link in the universal chain. Beauty descends from God into nature: but there it would perish and does except when a Man appreciates it with worship and thus as it were sends it back to God: so that through his consciousness what descended ascends again and the perfect circle is made.⁴⁴

In this way, the work of the contemplative mind holds creatures up into consummate reality, re-kindling within them their fullness and final end— perhaps even in analogy to the Eucharistic offering, in which the gifts and creatures of bread and wine, held up into the offering of the Word made flesh, are replenished beyond all creaturely limits and thus become more really themselves, more really food and drink, precisely in being offered up into the authoring Word of their existence. I want to suggest that the contemplative turn reconnects creatures to their creative and life-giving truth in God—and that, perhaps, to make such an offering is the very heart of being human. Traherne surely intends to make exactly this eucharistically-oriented point: The Idea of Heaven and Earth in the Soul of Man, is more Precious with GOD than the Things them selvs, and more Excellent in nature . . . . The World within you is an offering returned. Which is infinitly more Acceptable to GOD Almighty, since it came from him that it might return unto Him. Wherein the Mysterie is Great. For GOD hath made you able to Creat Worlds in your mind, which are more Precious unto Him then those which He Created: And to Give and offer up the World unto Him, which is very Delightfull in flowing from Him, but much more in Returning to Him. Besides all which in its own Nature also a Thought of the World, or the World in a Thought is more Excellent then the World, because it is Spiritual and Nearer unto GOD.⁴⁵

In this important passage, Traherne not only deploys the classical notion that the mind or soul is in a sense all things by virtue of its ability to conceive them intelligibly, but he also suggests that it is indeed the human calling given by God—to receive God’s good gifts for the very purpose of sharing them back again in great thanksgiving, receiving and returning all things in image of that eternal Trinitarian receiving and returning, which is the

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infinite act of existence itself and the inexhaustible life of God. Moreover, as Traherne adds, God seems to delight in this mutual involvement of creatures in their own return, “ . . . for GOD hath made you able to Creat Worlds in your mind, which are more Precious unto Him then those which He Created.” Robert Watson directs us to the contemplative epistemology at work in Traherne : “The problem of knowing the essence of an object is no problem at all, if its essence, its very being, is (as God intends) inseparable from that knowledge: it takes on the form of our knowing of it, and we take on the form of the thing known . . . .”⁴⁶ Perhaps what Traherne is in fact drawing his readers to perceive is the consciousness at the heart of all things: when a rational mind recognizes and is actualized by the intelligibility at the core of another creature then both that creature and the one who contemplates it are drawn together in communion with the divine consciousness that is thinking them both into being moment by moment. Thus, each creaturely being is in fact not just a thing but a “thingk,” a being that is the manifestation in finite form of the divine thinking that creates it. Much of the language among exponents of the divine ideas teaching certainly evokes a sense of human contemplation as establishing a mediation between the finite creaturely expressions of things and their eternal archetypes in the divine mind. But it would be fair to say that an alternative reading, perhaps a more radical one, suggests a gradual yet startling disclosure in the contemplative’s awareness: what if the apparent difference between earthly things and their heavenly ideas were in fact not so much a fundamental divide in being as a symptom of a divided consciousness? At lower levels of contemplative awareness, perhaps also in conditions distorted by the fear, envy, and cruelty that sin inflicts upon human life, consciousness is contracted and preoccupied within the constraints of an apparently limited economy of scarcity—things and even persons are objects of possessive rivalry and fearful antagonism. From this vantage point the human contemplative calling seems noble yet futile in attempting to open the finite existence of worldly reality to the generous superabundance of its divine archetype. But at a higher level of contemplative awareness, graced and guided by the interior mission of the Holy Spirit, consciousness is permeated by the infinite generosity of the divine life so that “things” are recognized as always in fact events of consciousness, ongoing acts of communication of their inexhaustible truth in God’s knowing and loving of them. In other words, finite objects are not wholly distinct nor divided from their heavenly truth; but rather their archetypal fullness in God and their unity with all other ideas in the Word are their fundamental reality. They are, as Traherne observes, always already in God, could we but recognize that.

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Eriugena hints at this twofold recognition: namely that things are in fact acts of intellect, primordially and continuously acts of the divine intellect; but also in virtue of the creaturely communion that God has established, things are reflected in human and angelic consciousness in their true reality—as events of communication and understanding. Eriugena asks us to consider, as it were, the “location” of creatures as a way of prompting us to wonder about their nature as events of consciousness: “where else do you suppose these things subsist but in the notions of them contained in the soul of the wise? For where they are comprehended, there they are; and they are nothing other than the understanding of themselves.”⁴⁷ It is as if, for Eriugena, everything were moments within a cosmic conversation that God has unfolded in order for all creatures to reach a level of such mutual understanding that they become participants in the divine conversation that is the Trinitarian life of God. In this perspective we could consider each creature (in its wonderful bodily expressiveness) as a “moment” of communication whose fulfillment arrives as it arouses the desire to understand within fellow creatures. In this way their bodily communicativeness is embraced and acknowledged within an act of intelligible understanding; as Eriugena says, each creature is in fact an event of consciousness: “they are nothing other than the understanding of themselves.” It’s important to add here that this perspective is far from being some form of pre-modern subjective idealism, but rather an assertion of the Christian belief in creation: all things that exist depend for their existence moment by moment upon the divine knowing and loving. What the divine ideas tradition brings to the fore in this Christian belief is the intimate presence of the divine speaking or consciousness as the very heart of every creature. We can begin to see, I hope, how the exponents of the divine ideas teaching understand the role of humanity’s contemplative calling in the “return,” or perhaps better, the consummating recognition of creation in its deepest reality. The contemplative calling is thus an ascent towards both greater unity and deeper wisdom. Thus, for example, in ascending from the sensible to the intelligible we are not leaving something behind at all—the sensible and the intelligible are not two different realms of different objects but rather the same reality apprehended in different modes of consciousness. The sensible is reality as we apprehend it discursively: a “slowed down” communication of reality in which like a beginner student we have to grasp each object one at a time in their isolated particularity, whereas when we have developed greater understanding we begin to see the whole intuitively all at once. Then we would see that sensible reality with all its beauty and

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bodily communication is the reflection in discursive consciousness of the more unified and communion-like veracity of reality in the infinite understanding or consciousness of God. To recur to my own overly simple analogy, we might say that this ascent in contemplative consciousness would be like the transition that could happen if characters within the world of a story were enabled to shift from seeing everything else in their world as individual objects over against themselves, to seeing everything from within the author’s own thinking of them all, the thinking that is at the heart of everything within the world of the story. Such a transition, because of the wonderful access of new meaning it entails, would perhaps even be likened to a kindling of ecstatic desire that carries the mind of a knower more and more into a participative understanding. In fact, it is something rather like this that we find in the divine ideas tradition; commenting on Pseudo-Dionysius, Perl notes: This ecstasy, as the completion of the cognitive ascent, is the proper perfection of our nature as cognitive beings. Significantly, Dionysius speaks of ecstasy with regard to both love and knowledge. All beings are by loving, or reverting to, God, and this reversion, as a receptive self-abandonment, is an erotic ecstasy. But the mode of reversion proper to cognitive beings is knowledge. To be, for a cognitive thing, is to know, and since all knowledge is knowledge of God, to be is to know God. Consequently, for us as rational souls capable of ascending to intellect and beyond, the cognitive ascent is our reversion, and the culmination of that ascent in the ecstatic union above intellect is the fulfillment of our nature . . . If being is the manifestation of God, then it is also the knowledge of God. Indeed, the very content of all things, as the manifestation of God in them, is therefore the awareness, the knowledge of God, in them. The whole of reality is God made manifest as the intelligible content of all things, as what is given to cognition in all its analogous modes.⁴⁸

The clarity of Perl’s analysis helpfully underscores the crucial elements in this Dionysian strand of the divine ideas tradition that I have been attempting to articulate. First, we note that all creatures are in motion towards their truest realization in and through their contemplative turning to God. As higher levels of consciousness are embodied in creaturely lives, the manifestation of God as their self-giving core becomes ever more perspicuous. In this strand of the tradition, then, the sensible and the intelligible are no longer perceived as divisions in reality itself but rather as different forms of

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awareness according to the level of contemplative consciousness being practiced; and at all levels of reality the divine self-knowing and loving are the very heart of every being’s consciousness. Eriugena captures with some poignancy these stages in a creature’s growing self-understanding, as the deepening self-consciousness just described begins to dawn and the corresponding shift in understanding one’s fellow creatures unfolds: True knowledge of all these [beings] is implanted in human nature although it is concealed from her that she has it until she is restored to her pristine and integral condition, in which with all clarity she will understand the magnitude and the beauty of the image that is fashioned within her, and will no longer be in ignorance of anything which is established within for she will be encompassed by the divine Light and turned towards God in Whom she will enjoy the perspicuous vision of all things.⁴⁹

If Perl’s account above is correct then the “beauty of the image that is fashioned within her” is the awakening consciousness of God’s own knowing of all things; in other words, when Eriugena speaks of human nature coming to enjoy the “vision of all things” in God, he is in a sense also saying that all things are the expression of God’s own vision of all things, the manifestation of God’s consciousness at their heart. In this way, I have been suggesting, we can begin to understand at least something of how the divine ideas tradition assisted Christians in understanding the universe as an ever more intelligible participant in the communion which is the very life of God. Perhaps few of our authors have expressed this perspective as startlingly and clearly as Meister Eckhart: As God speaks into the soul, the soul and he are one; but, as soon as this goes, there is a separation. The more that we ascend in our understanding, the more are we one in him. Therefore the Father speaks the Son always, in unity, and pours out in him all created things. They are all called to return into whence they have flowed out. All their life and their being is a calling and a hastening back to him from whom they have issued.⁵⁰

At the highest level of contemplative consciousness when God and the soul are not divided, then the universe as conversation becomes recognizable. All

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creatures are spoken by the Father in the Word and their deepest level of existence is marked by their desire to communicate and respond to the eternal communion of which they are the expression. It is to facilitate this communication and response that the contemplative calling exists, and the divine ideas teaching clearly underwrites the unity among different levels of contemplative consciousness, thus assisting Christian thinkers and mystics in deepening the awareness of their communities’ participation in the communion of creation with God.

The Paschal Mystery as Ground of Creation’s Return As I have already begun to suggest above, the return of creation (through the human contemplative calling) towards its fulfillment in God comes to be understood by Christians as not simply a naturally occurring event, but rather as a possibility entirely grounded in and resourced by the death and resurrection of Christ. In the eternal knowing and loving of God’s Trinitarian life, all creatures are also known and loved—precisely as imitable dimensions of God’s own life. As we saw in the previous section, we could even say that the creatures-to-be flow from and are consummated by the divine self-contemplation, that is, they are aspects of God’s selfunderstanding, of the divine consciousness. In the incarnation and outpouring of the Spirit through the crucified and risen Christ, Christians believe, humankind is drawn into personal unity with that eternal activity of divine knowing and loving in which all creatures exist and are consummately real as aspects of God’s own reality—that is, as ideas in the mind of God. Thus, we are invited to explore the significance of the reconstitution of human consciousness within its new creation in Christ. Perhaps we could even say that, in Christ, the apprehension of creatures in the human mind is a participation in the eternal consciousness of all creatures within the divine mind. Now we must investigate some evidence from exponents of the divine ideas teaching that might support the argument I am making. In an important section in Augustine’s On the Trinity, the bishop explores the nature of the new form of consciousness that is granted to humankind through baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. If then we are being renewed in the spirit of our mind, and if it is this new man who is being renewed for the recognition of God according to the image of him who created him, there can be no doubt that man was not

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made to the image of him who created him as regards his body or any old part of his consciousness, but as regards the rational mind, which is capable of recognizing God Now it is with respect to this renewal that we are also made sons of God through Christian baptism, and when we put on the new man it is of course Christ that we put on through faith . . . . the mind of man does not remain the image of God except in the part which adheres to the eternal ideas to contemplate or consult them.⁵¹

In the first paragraph above, Augustine connects Paul’s language about the renewal of our mind, and even perhaps about our coming to share in the mind of Christ, with a renewal within the human person of the image of God; and we note that for Augustine this is very importantly an image grounded in the possibility of a certain form of consciousness of God. In the second paragraph, Augustine directly identifies this new consciousness as a participation in Christ; and what this participation in Christ makes possible, by renewing the image of God within us, is nothing less than a coming to share in God’s own knowing of Godself (a knowing which is eternally expressed in the birth of the Word in whom dwell the eternal ideas of all things), that is, an adhering “to the eternal ideas to contemplate or consult them.” Thus Augustine crucially confirms our hunch that the transformation of consciousness Christians are invited towards, through baptism into the Paschal mystery, leads them into a new communion with the divine ideas, a communion that permits what Paul calls a veritable new creation—a new perception of all reality from within the eternal divine knowing and loving of all things. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, exponents of the divine ideas teaching regard the passage or transition from consciousness of a thing’s sensory image to consciousness of its intelligible form as the crucial means by which the contemplative communion between the earthly and heavenly is achieved. I want to argue further, then, that as Christians came to deepening participation within, and understanding of, the dying and rising of Christ, they came to regard Christ’s passage from mortal existence to the glorified body of his resurrection not simply as analogous to the passage of a thing from its sensible image to its intelligible form (as that cognitive passage takes place within a human or angelic mind)—rather they came to perceive the Paschal mystery as itself the powerful constitutive action within our world that makes possible the passage of contemplative consciousness towards

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communion. How could this be? Because for our thinkers the radiant expressivity of all creatures that awakens rational minds and gives birth to intelligibility is in fact nothing less than the ongoing exemplarity of the divine Word, speaking within every creature its eternal truth and therefore awakening the begetting of its intelligible and universally meaningful form through the mediation of human consciousness. Thus, all that the Word incarnate achieves and undergoes is determinative for the divine ideas and the contemplation of them.⁵² Once again Zachary Hayes offers this illuminating exposition of this view as we find it in the thought of Bonaventure: All created existence and all knowledge of existent things are grounded in the eternal Word. But the Word became flesh; the universal ground of being and knowing is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It follows from this that all knowledge, whereby the macrocosm enters into the microcosm, is grounded in Christ and is revelatory of His inner mystery, the Word.⁵³

The rich density of this paragraph requires unpacking. In the first sentence Hayes reminds us that for Bonaventure, as well as all other exponents of the divine ideas teaching, the exemplar forms of all creatures-to-be dwell within the eternal Word as God’s own knowing of Godself; and these divine ideas are, as we have frequently noted, both the archetypal forms according to which creatures exist in their finite expression within time, and also the eternal reasons by which the authentic and imperishable truth of the creatures may be known. Thus “the universal ground of being and knowing is incarnate in Jesus,” and this is why the human cognitive act by means of which a creature’s sensible form may be raised towards its intelligibility within a rational mind is in fact a participation in the expressivity of the Word—which of course reaches its consummation in Christ’s handing over of his mortal bodily communicativeness in his death, and, in his resurrection, into inexhaustible life and intelligibility (in the universal communicativeness of his glorified body). In her insightful analysis of Bonaventure’s thought Michelle Karnes summarizes this noetic significance of Christ’s incarnation and Paschal mystery: It is also Christ who enables the intellect to know things in their fullness. Through his incarnation and passion, he provided access to eternal things via earthly ones, not only clearing a path to heaven but also enabling the

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human mind to rise from knowledge to wisdom. His incarnation, in other words, bore both soteriological and cognitive significance . . . . When it grasps any truth, then, the mind relies on the cognitive resources of Christ’s incarnation and passion, which built a bridge between this world and God.⁵⁴

In order to see why Christ’s incarnation and passion should accomplish this noetic liberation for humanity, it’s helpful to recall how profoundly the divine ideas are at work in Bonaventure’s analysis. In the light of the Incarnation, says Bonaventure, we can recognize three different levels or expressions of the divine ideas: in the divine mind as the ideal reasons of all things, in matter as the seminal reasons that account for the particularity of each thing, and in the rational creaturely mind as the intellectual principles by which things are known. But then Bonaventure takes another step: he wants to emphasize the way in which in all three instantiations of the divine ideas are fruitful, that is, how they lead to expressivity and communication of meaning. So he notes, for example, that “seminal principles cannot exist in matter without generation and the production of form; neither can intellectual principles exist in the soul without the generation of a word in the mind.” The principles or reasons, at every level of their expression, are the markers of a divine exemplarity and self-communication; and indeed Bonaventure goes on to observe that the very ground of this is none other than the fact that the “ideal principles cannot exist in God without the generation of the Word from the Father.” Now Bonaventure proceeds to bring home the power of this recognition of the threefold fruitfulness of divine ideas, namely by showing how it underwrites the absolute authority and consummate fulfillment of all things achieved in Christ, who holds together in himself all three levels of the divine expressivity of the ideas: we come to the conclusion that the highest and noblest perfection cannot exist in the world unless that nature in which the seminal principles are present, and that nature in which the intellectual principles are present, and that nature in which the ideal principles are present are simultaneously brought together in the unity of one person, as was done in the incarnation of the Son of God.⁵⁵

Here again we can see how the divine ideas function to support the perception of Christian thinkers and mystics that, in Christ, heaven has communicated with earth—in a manner that sets free the contemplative

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consciousness to understand the divine knowing and loving precisely as Christians encounter that self-communication embodied in Christ. As bearer within himself of God’s eternal understanding and desire for each creature, Christ has the authority to hand over the world’s antagonistic misconception of God’s truth into the infinite creative generosity of the One who sent Christ into the world; and the One who sent him expresses the authentic divine meaning of all things by raising Christ from the dead. In this way the passage of contemplative consciousness turns out to be fundamentally and necessarily a participation in the passage of the Word incarnate. Hayes summarizes in luminous fashion this perspective in Bonaventure’s thought: The Word is the principle through which creation comes to be. Hence, all genuine knowledge is in some way knowledge of the Word. And in as far as the Word has become visible and audible in Jesus Christ, He offers to the world the knowledge of its own deepest truth. In the knowledge of its eternal Exemplar, the world comes to a knowledge of its origin in God’s loving goodness and to a knowledge of its goal which is the transforming union with God through conformity with the eternal Exemplar.⁵⁶

It is this “union with God through conformity with the eternal Exemplar,” that is, conformity with God’s own Idea of Godself, that Christians call beatitude and that we must now explore in the final chapter.

Notes 1. Augustine, The Trinity (De Trinitate) VIII.2.4, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), 243–244. 2. Bonaventure, Collationes on the Six Days XII.5, trans. Jose de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, vol. 5 (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970), 174–175. 3. For discussion of this important theme in Maximus the Confessor, see Joshua Lollar, To See Into the Life of Things: The Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor and his Predecessors (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 246, 297ff. 4. Eriugena, Periphyseon V, 983A–B, trans. John O’Meara (Montreal: Bellarmine, 1987), 667–668. 5. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press; 2007), 61. 6. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 18–19. 7. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 7.

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8. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. XV (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 185. 9. C. S. Lewis, Preface to D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, 1952; quoted from Clyde Kilby, ed., A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 219–220. 10. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 31. 11. Hugh of St Victor, “On the Three Days” 4.3 in Trinity and Creation: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Richard, and Adam of St Victor, ed. Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coulter (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2011), 63–64. 12. Constant J. Mews, “The World as Text: The Bible and the Book of Nature in Twelfth-Century Theology,” in Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and Thomas E. Burman (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 95–122. 13. C. S. Lewis, “Different Tastes in Literature (1946),” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 121. 14. C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in On Stories, p. 38. 15. C. S. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” in On Stories, p. 90. 16. Maximus, Amb. Jo. 7/PG 91:1084D; in Nicholas Constas (ed. and trans.), On Difficulties in the Church Fathers (The Ambigua): Vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 107. 17. Paul Blowers, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 73. Cf. Maximus, Amb. Jo. 33 PG 91:1285D–1288A and Th. Oec. 2.61/PG 91: 1152A–B. 18. Maximus, Ambiguum 33, in Nicholas Constas (ed. and trans.), On Difficulties in the Church Fathers (The Ambigua): Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 63. 19. Augustine, De Trinitate XII.3.14; Hill, 330. 20. St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Summa Theologica Vol. III, IIa.IIae, Q.9, a. 2, reply to objection 1 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). 21. John Scotus Eriugena, “Homily on the Prologue of the Gospel of John 11,” in John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 166; for more on the world as speech and book in Eriugena, Donald F. Duclow, “Nature as Speech and Book in John Scotus Eriugena,” Mediaevalia 3 (1977): 131–140. 22. Eriugena, “Homily on John.” 23. Eriugena, “Homily on John,” par. 19, 172. 24. Eriugena, “Homily on John,” 173. 25. Bonaventure, Collations XIII.12. 26. Eric Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 108.

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27. Meister Eckhart, ed. Bernard McGinn and Edmund Colledge, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), Sermon 53, pp. 204–205. 28. Zachary Hayes, “Incarnation and Creation in the Theology of St. Bonaventure,” in Studies Honoring Ignatius Charles Brady, Friar Minor, ed. Romano Stephen Almagno, O.F.M. and Conrad L. Harkins, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1976), 314. 29. Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 14. 30. Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 323. 31. Michael J. B. Allen, “Marsilio Ficino on Significatio,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXVI (2002): 30–43, here 41. 32. Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, IV.24.41, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), Vol. 1, 132. See also The City of God XI.29 on the angels’ knowledge of creatures in the Word. 33. Marsilio Ficino, The Philebus Commentary, I.8, trans. Michael J. B. Allen (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1975), 124. 34. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon II, 536B, trans. John O’Meara (Montreal: Bellarmine, 1987), 136. 35. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II.2.2, trans. James F. Anderson (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1956/1975), 30. 36. SCG II.2.4; Anderson, 31. 37. SCG II.2.5, Anderson, 33. 38. SCG II.46.5, Anderson, 141. 39. ST Ia Q.80, a.1, resp. 40. Hayes, “Incarnation and Creation,” 319. 41. Maximus, Ambigua 41, 1308A 9–15; as quoted in Lollar, To See into the Life of Things, 309. 42. Traherne, Centuries I.27. 43. Traherne, Centuries III.68. 44. Lewis to his childhood friend Arthur Greaves, Letter 150, in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greaves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1979), 386. 45. Traherne, Centuries, II.90. 46. Watson, Back to Nature, 298. 47. Eriugena, Periphyseon IV, 769D, 415. 48. Perl, Theophany, 97. 49. Eriugena, Periphyseon IV, 769C, 415. 50. Eckhart, Sermon 53; McGinn & Colledge, 205. 51. Augustine, De Trinitate XII.3.12; Hill, 329. 52. Cf. Lollar, To See Into the Life of Things, 326.

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53. Zachary Hayes, The Hidden Center: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Press, 2000), 96. 54. Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 68–69. 55. St. Bonaventure, ed. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M., St. Bonaventure’s On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1996), Para. 20, 55–57. 56. Hayes, The Hidden Center, 198.

5 Beatitude and the Goodness of Truth For centuries Christian teachers and mystical theologians have with delight and wonder pondered the account of creation in the book of Genesis. Listening for the depth of meaning in each of the “six days,” these writers frequently produced hexaemeral literature marked by speculative creativity and an imagination open to realities beyond any easy conceptualization. Origen, Augustine, Eriugena, and Eckhart, for example, all relished the echo of fathomless meaning that they heard in the words “in the beginning” in both Genesis and the Gospel of John. For them, the “beginning” in which God creates all things is none other than the eternal Word, the original and primordial Idea in which God expresses all of Godself, including all the ways in which creatures might come to share in the gift of existence. Thus as we have seen throughout this book, within the Father’s eternal self-knowing in the Word dwell the imperishable archetypes according to which all creatures come to be, or considered from another vantage point, the eternal reasons by which the truth of all creatures may be known. Some thinkers especially enjoyed the possibility that the first account of paradise in Genesis is really a story about humankind dwelling among the divine ideas, and in their midst delighting in the unhindered communication of God.¹ This paradise was thus an intelligible world in which all beings were truly and vibrantly themselves, free to live in perfect unity, and able to communicate without distortion the divine generosity of meaning at their heart. For Eriugena, the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden is none other than Christ the Word incarnate, who as the inexhaustible source of all the ideas can be figured as their true food, the bread of heaven. In Christ’s earthly ministry of selfgiving he expresses the eternal giving of God at the heart of every creature; thus Christ savingly renews within them God’s everlasting knowing and loving, and so enables their return to (or re-harmonization with) their divine idea and their truth. “ . . . the Tree of Life is Christ, and its fruit is the blessed life and eternal peace in the contemplation of the Truth.”² Thus for many of our authors, the ideas were fruitful elements of a richly conceived cosmic vision in which the contemplation of creation unfurls and blossoms into a growing understanding of the world’s re-creation. Not surprisingly, then, The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology. Mark A. McIntosh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Mark A. McIntosh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199580811.003.0006

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the divine ideas fostered a keen theological interest in the parallels, foreshadowings, and analogies between the paradise of our beginnings and the paradise of our consummate fulfillment. In this chapter I want to emulate this wondering imagination of our Christian forebears by joining them in considering fundamental analogies at the heart of our universe and its destiny—analogies or participations that, as we have seen, are often resourced by the divine ideas teaching precisely because they are analogies of intelligibility. This analogical intelligibility derives from the fact that the divine ideas are present in different modes within the Trinitarian life of God, within creation, within creaturely understanding, and within the beatific vision. Accordingly we could say that I am exploring four acts of knowing, acts in which divine truth is communicated so that reality may be given birth and rebirth. The primordial ground of truth is God’s perfect knowing of Godself in the Word. Augustine insists that our human ability to understand reality in fact flows from God’s invitation to share in God’s self-knowing, for “[o]ur enlightenment is to participate in the Word, that is, in that ‘life which is the light of men’ (John 1:4).”³ Let me briefly indicate these four analogous, or mutually participating, events of truth which will then be the focus of the rest of this chapter. The first of these is the eternal “in the beginning,” God’s everlasting knowing and loving of Godself which is the inexhaustible ground of truth itself, and nothing less than the event of God’s own happiness or beatitude, the joy of the divine self-communication. The second is the human participation in intelligibility, the way in which the human act of understanding is a kind of faint likeness within our present existence of the share in God’s beatitude of self-understanding that God intends, Christians believe, to be our consummation. The third facet is the expression in our world of God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself which we encounter as the death and resurrection of Jesus; in this event the truth of God, which includes the truth of all creatures, is vindicated—and in the resurrection it is shown to be beloved when God manifests Christ’s union with the inexhaustible Life that is God. This beginning of the eighth day of the new creation is the ground and basis for the fourth aspect, namely the human sharing in God’s beatitude that comes as God, Christians believe, unites human beings to Godself in order to share with us the primordial truth of all God’s joy and delight in the eternal self-giving of God; having sought to contemplate God’s eternal ideas at the heart of all creatures, human beings enjoy in beatitude a vision that includes the act of knowing all creatures in their imperishable truth within God.

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By sketching these four analogous modes of intelligibility I hope to show how the divine ideas are woven into the fabric of Christian thinking about the destiny of all creatures, and about the role of truth in all its goodness in the mending and fulfilling of life.

Divine Beatitude: The Inclusive Plenitude of Truth Few points have emerged more clearly throughout this book than the intense wonder and joy that awaken in the exponents of the divine ideas tradition as they contemplate the Trinitarian ground of all creatures. Moreover for them this wondering joy is really a threefold awareness: first, that in knowing Godself God knows the cherishable and inclusive truth of all creatures; second, that this eternal act of self-knowing is the ground of truth itself, the very source and transformative goodness of all truth; and third, more wonderfully still, this divine act of self-knowing—in which God knows all creatures and in which truth itself is established—is also the basis of God’s infinite and inexhaustible joy, the beatitude or happiness that is the very life of God. I explore each of these three perceptions in the remainder of this section. Let me begin by examining four parallel passages that come respectively from Augustine, Maximus, Eriugena, and Aquinas. In the four passages below I want to elucidate how the divine ideas teaching allows these thinkers to emphasize certain crucial aspects of the truth of all creatures as it exists eternally in the Trinity. In order to facilitate this I have inserted letters at comparable points within each passage and will then discuss these points together, rather than comment on each passage in isolation from the others. There is but one Word of God, through which all things were made (John 1:1–6), [A] which is unchanging truth, [B] in which all things are primordially and unchangingly together, not only things that are in the whole of this creation, but things that have been and will be; but there it is not a question of “have been” and “will be,” there they simply are; [C] and all things there are life and all are one, and indeed there is there but one “one” and one life.⁴ [B] We affirm that the one Logos is many logoi and that the many logoi are One. Because the One goes forth out of goodness into individual being, creating and preserving them, the One is many. [C] Moreover, the many

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are directed towards the One, and are providentially guided in that direction. It is as though they were drawn to an all-powerful center that had built into it the beginnings of the lines that go out from it and that gathers them all together. In this way the many are one. [B] Therefore we are and are called a portion of God because the logoi of our being pre-existed in God. Further, [A] we are said to have slipped down from above because we do not move in accord with the Logos who pre-existed in God through whom we came to be.⁵ [B] For his generation from the Father is itself the creation of all causes and the working and making of all things that proceed from the causes into the genera and species. All things were made by the generation of the GodWord from the God-Principle . . . . [A] All things, therefore, that have been made through the Word live in him unchangeably and are life; none of them ever existed or will exist in him according to times or places; [C] but beyond all time and place they all are one in him and subsist universally, visible things and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, rational and irrational; and, simply, heaven and earth, the depths and whatever is in them, live in him and are life and eternally subsist. [A] And the things which seem to us to be devoid of all vital motion live in the Word.⁶ [C] The Word also has a kind of essential kinship not only with the rational nature, but also universally with the whole of creation, [B] since the Word contains the essences of all things created by God, just as man the artist in the conception of his intellect comprehends the essences of all the products of art. [A] Thus, then, all creatures are nothing but a kind of real expression and representation of those things which are comprehended in the conception of the divine Word.⁷

Without meaning to elide the differences among our authors, we can nonetheless see quite readily the common interests they elucidate regarding the manifold significance of the divine ideas. If we look first at the passages headed by the letter [A], we can see the different ways in which the authors ponder the ground of ultimate truth in the universe. Augustine forthrightly identifies the basis of all truth with the Word, namely the perfect selfknowing and self-communication of God which the Word is. Maximus shows how this understanding functions: he describes the degree to which the creatures in time have deviated from their ultimate truth within the Word as a falling away from their life in God. Comparing Eriugena and Aquinas on this point offers us a helpful sense of the dual orientations that

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the divine ideas provide on the question of the truth of all things: Eriugena emphasizes the truth of reality as manifest by its unchangeable and imperishable life within the Word eternal; Aquinas surely presupposes this view but offers the other side of the coin, namely the veracity with which creatures exist in time as real representations of God’s eternal self-knowing—the eternal procession of the Word, which includes all creaturely participations in God. Turning to the passages marked [B], our authors all confirm that the Word is the ground and measure of truth for, as we can see, they all identify the primordial and imperishable truth of the creatures with the quality of their existence as divine ideas within the Word. In other words, God’s knowing and loving of the creatures to be—as aspects of God’s own essence—establishes in the divine ideas their fundamental truth and value, and thus the divine ideas teaching allows our authors to understand the finite historical existence of creatures in relation to the divine knowing and loving that eternally generates their truth and goodness in God. The passages marked [C] point towards an important and beautiful corollary, namely that the full plenitude of all creatures’ truth in God is an inclusive and unified reality that unmasks the divisions and antipathies of our historical existence as cruel distortions of the real capacity for harmony and communion among all creatures. Augustine and Eriugena both emphasize that the vivacity and unity of the divine ideas is a direct expression of their existence as aspects of the divine essence itself. Maximus assists us in conceiving the immeasurable power of this divine unity to overcome creaturely divisions, using the ancient image of points on a circle as projections that extend outward from one unified center, and which have their fundamental reality in that unity from which they flow. Thomas, with his usual capacity to consider earth within the perspective of heaven, hints at the proper amity that should exist among creatures, for they all without exception share kinship with the Word, since the Word “contains the essences” of all creatures. For Thomas, the wonderful diversity of creatures expresses something of the incomprehensible richness of God’s infinite life, and yet the creaturely diversity is an unfolding within time of the inexhaustible unity of God. Our authors can marvel at the mystical truth of all creatures because the divine ideas teaching gives them a language and grammar for better understanding that hidden reality of all creatures as it exists in the truth who is God. I want to take a further step now and argue that for our authors not only is God the inclusive and sovereign plenitude of truth, but that the goodness of God’s truth comes to expression in our world as fundamentally salvific.

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For Aquinas, the Word’s eternal and perfect expression of the Father is the very basis of truth itself. For in the case of God, says Thomas, “his being is not only conformed to his intellect, but it is the very act of his intellect; and his act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being and every other intellect . . . . Whence it follows not only that the truth is in him, but that he is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth.”⁸ The divine act of understanding, as Thomas explains throughout his teaching, is in fact the eternal begetting of the Word; and this act of understanding eternally coincides with the divine willing, the procession of God the Holy Spirit. God is truth, in other words, precisely because the eternal event of knowing and delighted recognition, the eternal begetting of the Word and spiration of the Spirit, is the very life of God—and that life is one with the eternal event of Truth, its “sovereign” occasion and ground of whatsoever truths there could be. It’s crucial for the argument I’m making that we see that Truth is thus, for Thomas, not only or merely a divine attribute, but flows directly from the eternal Trinitarian “event” by which God is God, namely, the Father’s recognition of the Word’s perfect imaging of God in the joy of their Spirit. And this eternal event, I’m suggesting, is made present in our world in and through the resurrection of Jesus, by which the Father vindicates the truth and identity of his beloved Child, overturning the false finality of death as the world’s last “word” about Jesus and his mission. The Father’s knowing and loving of the incarnate Word in the resurrection is one with the divine knowing and loving of the ideas of all creatures dwelling eternally within the Word. Most importantly, if the mysterious joy of Christ’s resurrection is the expression in our world of the eternal self-knowing and loving of God, then this divine act of understanding—which radiates into time as resurrection life and includes the truth of all creatures—is in fact nothing less than a glimpse of God’s own joy or happiness, God’s beatitude. As Aquinas observes, God is called blessed or happy in respect of the divine act of understanding.⁹ For Thomas, the greatest perfection and happiness of every nature is the consummation of its highest power, and for an intellectual nature this consummation comes as the ultimate comprehension of reality; and in knowing Godself, God comprehends the infinite act of existence itself and all that flows from this. And thus Thomas concludes: Now in God, to be and to understand are one and the same thing; differing only in the manner of our understanding them. Beatitude must therefore be assigned to God in respect of His intellect; as also to the blessed, who are called blessed [beati] by reason of the assimilation to His beatitude.¹⁰

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To know the infinite reality of Godself and all beings that may come to participate in that divine life is to know the primordial and unsurpassable truth—and more wonderfully still, it is an eternal act of infinite happiness. Significantly, Thomas adverts at the end of his discussion of divine beatitude to the powerfully inclusive tide of this divine act of knowing and loving, drawing those who are called blessed into a share or participation in the divine self-understanding. In the next section I want to indicate the ways in which this ultimate beatitude—as infinite intelligibility—is prefigured in earthly human consciousness.

The Beatific Orientation of Human Knowing Christians have long believed not only that the human mind hungers for truth as the body for food, but also that the mind’s contemplation of truth fulfills our humanity in a wonderfully paradoxical manner—for the ultimate truth that alone wholly and completely satisfies our hunger for reality is a truth we can glimpse but never grasp, can enjoy but never come to its end, namely the truth who is God. In this section, then, I want to continue to use the divine ideas as a way of tracing the isomorphic or analogous relation between God’s eternal knowing of Godself and our lifelong journey towards our mind’s neverending fulfillment (by coming to participate in that divine act of selfunderstanding)—a participation glimmering already in our understanding of truth in this mortal life. In the previous chapter we explored in some detail generally received ancient and medieval views of the process of human cognition: the mind abstracts from its sense impressions of a physical object the intelligible form or idea of that object, and in this way the human mind gives birth to the spiritual or intelligible reality of its fellow creature. And I suggested that in a sense this transformation of consciousness is, for exponents of the divine ideas tradition, a key element in the recovery of unity among all creatures and between the creation and the creator. As Bernard McGinn observes regarding Eriugena: “His great system of thought, from start to finish, was intended to provide an account of how the whole universe through the mediation of the conscious human subject returns to its final union with the hidden God.”¹¹ So there is already this global analogy between the role of human consciousness on earth and the fulfillment of a unified consciousness in heaven: the analogy in this case is between the earthly act of the human mind in recognizing the divine idea

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or intelligible form at the heart of its fellow creatures and the act of the human mind in beatitude when it recognizes itself and all its fellow creatures in the eternal truth of their divine ideas. How can this be? In other words, how can our present act of understanding bear within itself a faint stamp of that share in God’s own understanding that Christians call the beatific vision? For most of the writers we have been examining, the act of understanding involves two elements: the object to be understood, and the faculty of understanding—that is the ability of the human mind, having been presented with a sense impression of the object, to conceive and recognize the intelligible truth of that object. Since the time of Plato the analogy between human understanding and visual perception has been found helpful. In the act of vision, we have, say, a tree, and we have the sunlight that makes our vision of the tree possible—the sunlight illuminates the object so that our eye can see it. By analogy we say that when the mind is presented with an object for its understanding, our intellectual faculty is the “light” of reason that allows us to recognize and know the truth of the object. Since the time of early modernity the prevailing view of this light of reason has confined it within the individual scope of the modern autonomous self, a capacity entirely our own and “enclosed” within the individualist self. But for most of the history of Christian thought the human person has been understood in more porous or relational terms; the light of our minds has been seen not so much as a private capacity of an individualized self but rather a share or participation in the universal reality of wisdom and its power to shed light on everything. Wisdom in this tradition of Christian thought is the name for God’s own authoring knowledge of all things. Wisdom, in other words, is God’s knowledge of Godself, including (as we have seen throughout this book) the divine ideas of all the ways in which creatures may come to share in the gift of existence. Eriugena, for example, compares the human mind’s openness to the light of wisdom with the air which can become luminous by the light of the sun: Just as the air that surrounds us does not shine through itself but is called “darkness,” yet can participate in the light of the sun, so our nature, considered in itself, is a kind of dark substance, but is capable of participating in the light of wisdom. And as the said air, when it participates in the rays of the sun, is not said to shine of itself, but the splendor of the sun is said to appear in it so that it does not lose its own natural darkness and receives the light coming upon it, so the rational part of our nature, when it possesses the

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presence of the Word of God, does not through itself know things intelligible and its God, but does so through the divine light established in it.¹²

Eriugena envisions a cosmos in which creaturely reality participates in and manifests its divine ground. In such a view, natural human capacities such as the intellect are open to higher and higher levels of perfection, of coming to share in the divine consciousness; and this openness to wisdom is simply what we call the light of reason by which we are able to understand the truth of what we think. And, of course, we want to note carefully Eriugena’s point that it is precisely wisdom as the Word of God, bearing within himself the eternal self-knowing of God, which includes all creatures, whose presence draws the mind into the intelligible meaning of all things. While Eriugena insists that the human mind “does not through itself know things intelligible and its God, but does so through the divine light established in it,” other Christian thinkers conceived the mind’s participation in the power of God’s own knowing less as something that remains external or accidental to the power of our intellect but, rather, more as something that allows unknown potentials of our nature to blossom in the light of grace and even more so in the light of glory; thus the trajectory—nature, grace, glory—becomes for Aquinas a way of talking about the human person’s deepening friendship with God and the transformative power of that relationship to enhance the natural capacities God gives the human being in the continuous giving of its existence. Thus for Thomas the deepening friendship that God draws humankind into by the gift of faith enhances our natural capacity of understanding, that is, the light of reason, by a deepening share in God’s own self-understanding, which we call the light of grace. And in that intensified relationship with God that Christians call the beatific vision, says Thomas, the capacity of our intellect is yet more wonderfully enhanced so as to become a created likeness of God’s own act of self-understanding, and this Thomas calls the light of glory. But it is crucial to see that in each of these three phases of our understanding’s enhancement by God’s friendship with us, the “light” by which our mind is illumined into greater understanding of truth is in fact a participation in God’s own knowing of Godself which includes God’s knowing of the eternal reasons of all things. In order to see more clearly the underlying logic of this central feature of the divine ideas tradition, I want to look more closely at a passage from Thomas that we considered very briefly before. In this section of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas is helping his students to think more deeply about these two aspects of human cognition that we have already mentioned.

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Of course, he says, since we are embodied physical creatures, we know our fellow creatures through the communication of their physical reality impressed upon our senses. But how do we make sense of that impression, how do we come to recognize its intelligible meaning and so come to know the truth of it? This, he says, is the act of our intellect made possible by the light of reason, which illuminates and makes possible the conception of the truth of the object that we are seeking to know. But Thomas invites his students to think carefully about the source of this light of reason and he does so by outlining an important transformation in a commonly held notion of the ancient world, a transformation achieved by Christian belief in the divine Word made flesh: Plato held . . . that the forms of things subsist of themselves apart from matter; and these he called ideas, by participation of which he said that our intellect knows all things: so that just as corporeal matter by participating the idea of a stone becomes a stone, so our intellect, by participating the same idea, has knowledge of a stone. But since it seems contrary to faith that forms of things should subsist of themselves, outside the things themselves and apart from matter, as the Platonists held . . . Augustine (QQ. 83, qu. 46), for the ideas defended by Plato, substituted the types of all creatures existing in the Divine mind, according to which types all things are made in themselves, and are known to the human soul.¹³

Thomas reminds his students that Platonic forms or ideas were understood to actualize all material beings but also to inform, and thus actualize, the intellect of the human knower of material beings—the mind participating in the idea of a stone understands and knows the stone. But for Thomas, and as he assumes also for Augustine, understanding the forms or ideas as existing autonomously—apart from both matter and from God—“seems contrary to faith,” because it not only seems to suggest that the material embodiment of forms is a negative thing (and this would be strongly contradicted by the Incarnation) but it also seems to imply that God is not the immediate cause of every being’s existence as precisely what it is (and this would be strongly contradicted by the Christian belief that God directly and without any intermediaries created all things in and through the eternal Word, who is himself God). Thus Thomas suggests how the impact of Christian belief in the unity and co-equality of the Trinity transformed Plato’s ideas, reconceiving them more accurately as “the types of all creatures existing in the Divine mind, according to which types all things are made in themselves, and are

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known to the human soul.” It is important to note of course that Thomas carefully retains the twofold use of the ideas now especially that they are ideas in the mind or Word of God: the types or ideas are the exemplars according to which creatures come to be themselves, and they are also the eternal reasons by which the truth of the creatures may be known. Now Thomas takes an important next step, for as I said above he wants his students to think very carefully about precisely how the divine ideas illuminate the creaturely mind so as to give it the power of reason, namely the intellectual faculty that is able to recognize intelligible forms in the world around it. Would we want to say, he asks, that “the human soul knows all things in the eternal types”? Yes, he says, but with two qualifications. As we are neither angels nor the blessed in heaven, the object of our knowledge is always mediated to us through the physically embodied creatures around us; in other words God is not directly the object of our knowledge while we are on our earthly pilgrimage but is rather reflected in all the creatures. Accordingly, in our present life we find our objects of knowledge not directly as intelligible forms or ideas in the divine mind, but rather as those intelligible forms are expressed in the finite physical realities of this world. Nonetheless it is worth noting that even with respect to the object of our knowledge, Thomas emphasizes that ultimately in the case of the blessed in heaven these objects will be seen directly in God: “the soul, in the present state of life, cannot see all things in the eternal types; but the blessed who see God, and all things in Him, thus know all things in the eternal types.”¹⁴ But now we return to the important question of the light of reason, the intellectual faculty, that allows us to recognize, in the impressions our fellow creatures make upon our senses, the intelligible form or idea by which they may be known in all their truth. Recall that for Eriugena this light is the power to know truth that emanates eternally from the Word who is the infinite expression of the perfect divine self-knowing; for Eriugena this intellectual power illuminates the human mind—as sunlight illuminates the air—but never becomes our own faculty of understanding. Aquinas, by contrast, argues that this intellectual power of truth does indeed radiate from God’s eternal self-understanding but that it continually enhances our natural faculty of understanding, allowing our natural reason a kind of likeness or participation in the power of God’s own perfect knowing— which Thomas calls the uncreated light: one thing is said to be known in another as in a principle of knowledge: thus we might say that we see in the sun what we see by the sun. And thus

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we must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types. Whence it is written (Psalm 4:6–7), “Many say: Who showeth us good things?” which question the Psalmist answers, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us,” as though he were to say: By the seal of the Divine light in us, all things are made known to us.¹⁵

The careful logic of Thomas’ exposition offers abundant assistance to our own argument. Note that, like almost all the other authors in the divine ideas tradition, Thomas adverts to the analogy of the sun as a way of helping us think about the intellectual power: as the light of the sun is the principal or power that allows us to see things in the world around us, so we can say that in a certain mysterious sense—which wonderfully displays the intimate presence of the Creator within the creature—the light of God’s own knowing of truth is what allows us to “see” intellectually. “For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types.” As we know from many texts, when Thomas speaks of “the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types,” he is speaking of the infinite power of knowing truth that is the Trinity’s eternal act of self-knowing, the eternal procession of the Word in which God also knows all the divine ideas or eternal types of the creatures-to-be. This is the uncreated light that God continually shines within the rational creature, thus establishing in every moment our own “intellectual light itself which is in us” as nothing less than “a participated likeness of the uncreated light.” I’m arguing, then, that being human entails this ongoing analogy or imaging within us of the Father’s eternal knowing of the Son. Our every act of ordinary human understanding echoes both the primordial Trinitarian knowing from which all things flow and the consummate sharing in that Trinitarian knowing that Christians call the beatific vision. How might we more fully grasp this notion that our own ability to understand things could be a continuous gift within us of the power of understanding that comes from another? It is not simply a question of anyone giving us more information about things, but rather of giving us an ability to perceive and understand such information with greater power and insight. In the modern era we would as I said above tend to think of this intellectual capacity as something innate and personal to ourselves, enclosed

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within our notion of ourselves as individuals. But as we have seen, the divine ideas teaching engenders and facilitates a more relational perspective about ourselves and the universe—especially with respect to the knowledge of reality. The ideas point to a mystical depth of communion among (a) God as primordial knower of the truth of all creatures, (b) the creatures as finite reflections of that eternal truth, and (c) rational creatures such as humans and angels who are able to recognize and understand this truth of their fellow creatures as it actualizes their own intellect. Perhaps we could consider this analogy: on a visit to an art museum you join a tour of one of the galleries led by an expert art historian. For a brief while as you listen to her and look at the paintings, your own capacity to appreciate the artistry at work all around you is enhanced; your aesthetic capacity is illuminated and strengthened by her knowledge and you begin to notice things you have never observed or marveled at before. Now suppose, further, that you and the art historian become dear friends; over time, her ability to understand art, her wisdom about line and color and form, imbue your own aesthetic sensibility ever more profoundly precisely because of your deep friendship. In this way we could perhaps imagine what it would be like for our intellectual capacity to be strengthened and elevated while remaining our own. Moreover, the reality is infinitely greater than our analogy: unlike a fellow human such as our imaginary art historian, God is intimately present not only in the artistry of the world around us but also more intimately present at the ground of our own existence, Christians believe, than we could ever be present to one another. I raise all this simply in order to make more real and vivid for us how the exponents of the divine ideas teaching understood the mystical involvement of God, as wisdom herself, in human acts, perhaps especially human acts of understanding truth. Augustine gives a famous example of the way in which wisdom draws humankind towards herself. Notice how Augustine draws his readers along the itinerary of our common experience, showing how divine wisdom conducts us from an appreciation of the intelligible beauty around us towards an awareness of the capacity for universal understanding within us: If it is given us to rejoice in these true and certain blessings as they glimmer for us even now on our still darkly shadowed way, perhaps this is what the Scripture means when it describes how wisdom deals with the lovers who come to her . . . . Wherever you turn she speaks to you through certain traces of her operations. When you are falling away to external things she recalls you to return within by the very forms of external things. Whatever

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delights you in corporeal objects and entices you by appeal to the bodily senses, you may see is governed by number, and when you ask how that is so, you will return to your mind within, and know that you could neither approve nor disapprove things of sense unless you had within you, as it were, laws of beauty by which you judge all beautiful things which you perceive in the world.¹⁶

In the analogy I offered above, the deep personal affection that unites two friends allows the wisdom of one to become present in the other as a kind of inner power of understanding, an illuminating sense of the deepest criteria for making sense of reality. In a very similar way, says Augustine, “wisdom deals with the lovers who come to her,” heightening their delight in the beauty of the world around them by awakening their sense of wonder at its intelligibility—that the world is, as Augustine says, “governed by number,” that is, translucent to the light of intelligible form and structure so that the beauty perceived by the eye may, within the human mind, blossom into its spiritual or intelligible truth. Moreover, Augustine suggests, wisdom’s more important gift may well be the way in which she awakens her friends to that power of understanding, “laws of beauty by which you judge all beautiful things,” laws or criteria or a power of discernment that are the illuminating capacity within us of God’s own power of understanding. Thus our ability as human beings to recognize and know the truth of things is, in the divine ideas tradition, a continuous gift to us of participating in the Father’s knowing of Godself in the Son and of all things in him. But, Christians believe, in a world whose openness to truth is vitiated by fear, greed, and the violent assertion of power as the only criterion of truth or judgment, God chooses to manifest the infinite knowing of truth and loving of goodness not only within the capacities of the human mind but also definitively within the constraints of our own history, in Jesus of Nazareth.

The Resurrection of Christ: The Vindication of Truth The resurrection of Christ takes on a powerful new significance when considered from the perspective of the divine ideas tradition. It is not simply the appearing of Christ alive again, but the undoing of death as the fixity and entrapment of creation within a false world created by false consciousness— a world whose relationship with the living truth who is God has been twisted and broken by the power of mendacity to poison minds with fear, and so to

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shroud reality with a veil of scarcity, envy, and enmity. We recall that in the divine ideas teaching the universe is a continual unfolding of divine selfcommunication, in which all creatures are beloved partners, learning across the years of their finite existence how to share more fully in the consciousness of self-giving love from which they flow, and within which they were created to find their ultimate happiness. In Chapter 4 I suggested how the divine ideas tradition allows its exponents to think of existence itself as forms of consciousness: as manifold reflections in time of the divine consciousness. All creatures simultaneously flow forth from the divine knowing and loving and return to God through an expanding consciousness that participates to various degrees in God’s knowing and loving. All creatures process into time through the differentiation of consciousness into particular and wonderful diversity; and their return occurs through ever deeper fulfillment of their primordial truth in God. This is fostered through the contemplative consciousness of their fellow creatures, who recognize and serve that truth. For this reason we might even say that, from the perspective of the divine ideas teaching, the world depends for its fulfillment on the contemplative reverence for truth among the rational creatures: the desire to recognize and serve the immense goodness of God’s truth, which is alive and at work within creation. It is not coincidental that John’s Gospel, which was so foundational for the development of the divine ideas tradition (by its vision of all creatures coming to be in and through the eternal Word), is also the gospel that speaks most directly of the adversary of human nature, the devil, as the opponent of truth, a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). And the letter to the Hebrews (2:14) points to Christ’s sharing in our human condition precisely in order to overcome the power of the devil who manipulates the terror of death to enslave humanity within a distorted consciousness dominated by fear. The powerful narrative of Genesis 3 points to this figure of humanity’s enemy as cultivating within humankind a fundamental mistrust in the generous giving of the creator. At the heart of the story are the two trees in humanity’s garden: the tree of life, representing unhindered communication and communion with God, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, representing the possibility of grasping knowledge as power over the world apart from communion with God. The serpent immediately suggests that God’s present prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is really nothing more than an oppressive assertion of power, a manipulative act of envy intended to deprive humanity, God’s rivals, of tremendous power and life. By insinuating this, the serpent focuses human

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attention on the fruit of the tree as a material substance whose benefits should be seized, rather than as a communicative sign whose meaning should be pondered. We could also say that the serpent infects human consciousness with an unwitting compulsion towards idolatry, undermining the natural contemplative vision that rests in reverence before the iconicity of the created world (that is, its depth of mystical significance as the continuous self-communication of God). The narrative thus grounds the world’s subsequent devastation, and its degeneration into violent miscommunication and fear, in a primordial lie that tragically obscures the truth of reality as an expression of divine meaning. The various symptoms of reality’s undoing break out like contagion: the rich and beautiful differences among the creatures (e.g., between male and female and between humanity and the rest of creation) are no longer conceivable as opportunities for self-sharing, forever deepening communication brought forth precisely by the wonderful otherness of the other (itself prefiguring and preparing creation for communion with the divine Other); but rather these differences are misconceived and hardened into divisions, in which the powerful can only know themselves by oppressing the weak, marring all opportunities for communion by demonizing and victimizing the other in order to affirm the superiority of one’s own identity. As foreshadowed by the serpent’s lie about the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the material creation itself is misconceived; human consciousness darkened by fear seizes upon matter, no longer conceiving it as iconic, as “sloweddown” communication or intelligibility-embodied, but rather as an idolatrous stuff that must either possess oneself or be possessed—matter’s meaning is thus constricted within human constructions in an economy of deprivation and violent appropriation. The story of Cain suggests that his offering of another creature has become insufficient; the divine generosity is no longer experienced by him in his fellow creature, and in bitter envy he murders his brother and founds the first city, marked by his victimization of the other. The divine ideas tradition suggests an interpretation of the world’s fallenness as a grievous rupturing of consciousness within the whole creation. The Fall obliviates the possibility of communion established by the expression of God’s knowing and loving within every being, and the human response to that inexhaustible communication in contemplative wonder— and by an active gratitude that builds up ever more universal communion among creatures and with God. It is in this context that the divine ideas tradition sheds a particular light upon the Incarnation and the Paschal mystery.

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The stakes for a world conceived as a continuous expression of consciousness and of contemplative response to this divine truth are very high. The grotesque distortions of truth, for example, within the minds of white people about black people throughout centuries of slavery and lynching bear awful witness to the consequences of consciousness degenerating into malignant mendacity and fear. Equally telling is the common unwillingness even to acknowledge such distortions at work in our understandings of the other—most obviously in the cases of gender, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. As I write these words, the world is about three months into the coronavirus pandemic; even in this short period of time the news media have alerted the world to endlessly rehearsed untruths and obvious denials of fact (on both social media and from the mouths of government officials) all of which have significantly endangered even more of our fellow human beings. Indeed this is considered symptomatic of an era in which the self-interested denial of truth about climate change or even childhood vaccinations inflicts terrible costs, and the most sorrowful loss of our fellow creatures. It is in my view theologically abhorrent when masters of online misinformation openly crow about their deft distortion of reality (for example in the grievous aftermath of school shootings)—in what they like to insist is a “post-truth” world, poisonously weaponizing information to enrage their faction against others. Thus they foster the embitterment of human beings directly by means of the distortion of reality. A theology open to the insights of the divine ideas tradition cannot help but see all this as the sinful denial of God’s truth in all beings, and an unfaithful betrayal of the true goodness of creation. In the rest of this chapter I hope to show how a theology informed by the divine ideas teaching might interpret God’s response in Christ to the world’s infidelity to the good truth of creation and to humanity’s contemplative calling. Maximus the Confessor offers one of the most insightful accounts of humanity’s fall and redemption from within the divine ideas perspective. In his view the story of humanity’s exile from Eden is a story about the grievous loss of potential communion with God through a failure in human contemplation of reality. Maximus argues that humankind is misled into fantasizing about the world as a possessable object, and that such fantasies tragically obscure the very real divine generosity and meaning flowing at the heart of every creature. Instead of mediating communion with God, the creation— now subjected to human fantasy—can only provide a never-satisfying flux of biological growth and decay; in other words, the failure of the human contemplative vocation subjects the created order to its most basic biological necessities. As a result, humankind neglects to contemplate the logoi of the

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creatures, obscuring the divine self-giving and truth that all creatures were meant to communicate to one another.¹⁷ As I suggested above, the climate crisis alone might well suggest to us the devastatingly accurate insight of such exponents of the divine ideas tradition as Maximus—who recognize the denial of all creatures’ truth as the misconstruction of creaturely reality by a consciousness obsessed with human self-interest, which is of course ultimately proven to be mortally self-defeating. For Maximus humankind was meant to hold together within our consciousness the differences of the created order, by drawing all beings into closer harmony with their truth in God—by our manner of life and especially by our contemplative openness to God’s speech in all creatures. Human failure in this regard risks the possibility of creation falling further into distortion, away from its life-giving truth in God, and so ultimately back into nothingness. Thus the eternal Logos, in becoming incarnate as a human being, draws all creatures to himself in order to reestablish their unity with their true logoi in the Logos. As Joshua Lollar summarizes: “Christ Himself comes before us as the unified world that is itself united to its uncreated Cause. Christ becomes the constitutive logos, as well as the external manifestation, of the unity of the cosmos and thus guarantees the logical unity of all things.”¹⁸ Maximus suggests that the creation can indeed be restored through Christ for the very reason that the truth of each creature exists imperishably within God’s eternal knowing: “The logoi of all things known by God before their creation are securely fixed in God. They are in him who is the truth of all things.”¹⁹ Because of this God in Christ acts to restore the creation precisely by reuniting creatures with the knowledge of their true identity as it has always been known and loved in the eternal Word; God, says Maximus, “will by grace confer on those created beings the knowledge of what they themselves and other beings are in essence, and manifest the principles of their origin which preexist uniformly in him.”²⁰ As I apply the divine ideas teaching, I am led to suggest that this renewal of the creatures’ truth takes place most consummately in and through the vindication of that truth in the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Maximus describes this fulfillment of each creature, as it is brought by grace into deeper harmony with the truth of itself and of all its fellow beings in God: But in the future age when graced with divinization, [the human person] will affectionately love and cleave to the logoi already mentioned that preexisted in God, or rather, he will love God himself, in whom the logoi of

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beautiful things are securely grounded. In this way he becomes a portion of God, insofar as he exists through the logos of his being which is in God and insofar as he is good through the logos of his well-being which is in God; and insofar as he is God through the logos of his eternal being which is in God, he prizes the logoi and acts according to them. Through them he places himself wholly in God alone, wholly imprinting and forming God alone in himself, so that by grace he himself is God and is called God . . . . For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.²¹

Maximus speaks of these progressive states of creaturely fulfilment as being, well-being, and eternal well-being—a sequence not dissimilar from Western notions of the progression from nature to grace to glory. Again we notice how entirely this restoration of the creaturely order comes about through ever deeper communion with the truth of creatures in God. And for Maximus this unity of the creatures with their truth in the eternal Word is accomplished by the ever more complete embodiment or incarnation of the Word throughout the universe. I will argue below that it is precisely this selfcommunication of God, as the imperishable truth of all creatures, that is made manifest in God’s raising of Christ into the living truth of his own identity as God’s beloved. Now we come to a crucial step in my argument: so far we’ve considered how, in the divine ideas tradition, God’s eternal knowing of the creatures in the Word is the very ground of their existence in time and, in a certain way, the imperishable and perfect truth of what they each have it in them to become—a truth that, necessarily because we are creatures, we must arrive at through the adventure of an earthly life. But how is all this connected to the death and resurrection of Christ? All is connected by the fact that this creative knowing of the creatures takes place as the eternal activity of the Father’s self-knowing in the Son or Word, and as the Word’s perfect expression of all that the Father is, and in that eternal event of mutual love and delight whom we call God the Holy Spirit. And these eternal processions have their expression in time in the earthly missions of the Son and the Spirit, that is, in the Paschal mystery and Pentecost. In other words, the eternally perfect expression of the Father in the Word (and of course the imperishable truth of all creatures therein), is manifest in our world as the incarnation of the Word and his earthly ministry—and this is why Jesus holds such compelling authority among us, for he bears within himself the deep truth of all beings. One could perhaps go on, at another time, to

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consider how so many of Jesus’ actions do indeed seem to restore within creatures some fresh spring of their deep, unstinting truth in God’s knowledge and purposes for them. Loaves and fishes become miraculously imbued with a primal fullness and abundance; men, women, and children are recovered into the wholeness of their identity and life. By bearing the creatures up into the self-giving generosity of his life, Jesus seems able to release within them the fullness of their meaning, the divine idea of them, that lives imperishably in the Word’s eternal expression of the Father— which, I am arguing, is present in our world as the incarnation of the Word made flesh. The handing over of all things to the Father suggests the Paschal dimension within all of Christ’s ministry, expressing as it does the self-donation at the heart of his life, consummated in his death, and manifesting within our world the inexhaustible self-giving of the Trinity. As Jesus takes the world to himself, he draws it into his Paschal mystery, so that the mortal, biological, and world-constructed “truth” of things dies in Christ’s death. This also means that, just as in his earthly ministry Jesus was able to renew within creatures their deep truth in God, so infinitely more profoundly in his resurrection Jesus is able to re-create the imperishable truth of the creatures—precisely in and with the Father’s raising of Christ into the eternal truth of his generation as the Father’s Word. In the world we have made, the mortal expression of the creatures falls into ruin, distorted by lies, disease, oppression, war, and all violent misperceptions of others; Jesus the Word incarnate, Christians believe, willingly accepts to enter into this condition, falling under the cruel mendacity of those who insisted that he was dangerous and a blasphemer and, ultimately, accursed by God—and all this was apparently confirmed definitively by his subjection to death. That would seem to be the last word and the ultimate truth about him, the final determination of his meaning. The resurrection, I am arguing, is nothing less than the expression within this sinful situation of the Father’s eternal recognition of his beloved Child as the Truth itself, the true Word and meaning of God’s existence as self-giving love. And because this inexhaustible truth is the very life of God, it is infinitely stronger than death. In fact, it’s important to remind ourselves that God’s life is not “stronger” than death as though it were a reality on the same plane as creaturely life or death—and just happens fortunately to be a bit more powerful than death. For God’s life is the authoring source of all that exists and does not need to “overcome” the death of creatures by some sort of struggle; rather God simply knows and loves creatures everlastingly, with

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transcendent authority: the resurrection is not a “reversal” of death but the manifestation of the infinite life of God within our world. (To recur to my usual analogy, the resurrection of Jesus would be analogous not to the resuscitation of a character who died within the story of a novel, but rather to the miraculous transcendence of the character: from being a character within the world of the novel to being alive with the same kind of life as the novel’s author.) The resurrection of Jesus is his raising to the existence of the Author of Life itself, of God; it manifests within our world the Father’s infinite speaking of Godself in the Word, and therein the Father’s infinite recognition of the imperishable idea of Christ’s humanity in the Word, and indeed the imperishable idea of all creatures as they exist within God’s knowing and loving of them. As Thomas says at ST I.37.2 ad. 3: As the Father speaks himself and every creature by his begotten Word, inasmuch as the Word begotten adequately represents the Father and every creature; so he loves himself and every creature by the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as the Holy Spirit proceeds as the love of the primal goodness whereby the Father loves himself and every creature.

Aquinas highlights the Trinitarian ground of all creatures within God’s infinite knowing and loving of God, and this, I believe, is the infinite power of divine life that becomes manifest within our world as the resurrection of Christ—and in and through him becomes the way for all creatures to be raised into their everlasting truth. Thus, I have argued, the divine ideas tradition offers theology a way by which faith might come to some preliminary understanding regarding the efficacy of Christ’s resurrection for the whole creation. Christians believe that dying with Christ, they also live with him. I am suggesting how “being crucified with Christ” might indeed be a relinquishment of the good and lovely iconic biological body, but also a surrendering of its state of ensnarement within the toils of the world’s mistruths about us all—from idolatry to racism and every kind of xenophobia and bigotry—so that God’s imperishable and inexhaustible truth of each beloved creature, as it really is, and as it has been cherished eternally in the Spirit’s joy at the Word’s perfect imaging, might spring forth as the new creation, of which the risen Christ is the first fruit. In this section I have tried to illustrate how theology imbued with the divine ideas perspective might shed fresh light upon the significance of Christ’s resurrection, precisely as the manifestation and vindication of truth. It may be helpful to confirm that my attempt does indeed find support

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in the divine ideas tradition by examining a particularly robust, indeed exuberantly baroque, example of a parallel line of thought from the seventeenth-century thinker (and one-time chaplain to Oliver Cromwell), Peter Sterry. Almost all the features and themes we have examined are here presented with fresh vigor and insight. After the fall of the human family and at the fullness of time, writes Sterry, the eternal Word, who is the Image of God and the Idea of all Ideas, “the first of all Ideas,” appeared. Thus in Sterry’s view, Christ the Word who bears within himself the forms or ideas of all things, encompasses within his death the world’s undoing; and so Christ circumscribes within himself the world’s fall away from its truth known in God. And in the resurrection, says Sterry, Christ re-creates and replenishes within all the creatures the original idea and truth of all things as they are known in God. In order to appreciate the fully-imagined vision that Sterry presents, and how profoundly the divine ideas shape his understanding, it will be worthwhile to elucidate an extended passage. I have inserted letters to mark particular passages I will comment on after the full flow of Sterry’s remarkable discourse. Now our Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, the essential Image, the essential Harmony, the Righteousness of God, becomes a creature, springs up from beneath the foundations of the Creation in an Human Soul and Body in the midst of its ruines. This Jesus is the Original Image of the Creation, of Man, of every Creature, the Root, the Rule, the Actor of all, [A] who virtually, eminently comprehends all in their distinct Ideal Forms within himself. As so many eternal Beauties in his own eternal Beauty, who bringeth them forth from himself, beareth them in himself, as Flowers in their Garden-beds . . . . He therefore now, the Seed of Hope, of Promise sown in the Soul, dying together with the Soul in the Fall, now comes up through this death in the form of a man, fallen man, the Image of the whole . . . . [B] This Jesus by his Resurrection carries up with him, in his own Person, all things, the whole Creation . . . with its fall, ruines, and deaths into the Glory of the eternal Image, unto an Union with it . . . . [and in the Ascension and Pentecost] the fullness, the fruitfulness, the Divine Order of the Ideas; the Original Images of all things, in the most ample and blissful Harmony in his Person, he comes up, he springs forth in his Spirit . . . he rends the Veil, he reveals himself to the Soul in the Universal Harmony of his Person . . . . [C] He presents himself to the Soul, as its Idea, its Original Image . . . . The Lord Jesus, as he is the universal, the eternal Image and Harmony of the Divine Nature, of all Variety in the divine Nature, as he is

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the Idea of Ideas, thus is he the Original Image, the Idea of the Intellectual Soul, or of Man. [D] As then he forms himself in this Soul; he also formeth all things in it, that man comes forth from the bosome of his idea, replenished with the Ideas of all things . . . . [E] This Jesus, then, being risen, springs up into Man in the virtue of his Resurrection and together becomes the Resurrection of all things in man to man. And in like manner through man as the head of all, he riseth again in all the particular Forms of things, as they stand without man in themselves in their own proper Existencies.²²

With unparalleled lavishness, Sterry envisions the resurrection of Christ as effecting a re-creation of all beings by reinstating their unity and harmony with their primordial ideas in God. At [A] Sterry emphasizes the eternal grounding of all creatures in God’s own idea of all things in the Word, beautifully portraying in his metaphor (of the flowers growing in the primordial flower bed) the rich unfurling of all creatures as they blossom from their eternal types in Christ. Sterry seems to argue [B] that because Christ the Word incarnate includes all the images of the creatures within himself, his death can be universally inclusive and therefore his resurrection is equally the universal reunion of all creatures with their true “fruitfulness,” in the “Order of the Ideas.” Again we note the way in which Sterry creatively deploys organic metaphors so that the resurrection of all creatures in Christ is a kind of universal renewal of the earth, a cosmic springtime of truth regrown. Sharing company with Maximus, Eriugena, Bonaventure, and Traherne among others, Sterry then turns to the particular role of humankind [C] as the finite consciousness within which the forms of all creatures can be reflected and received intelligibly. As a result of this, Sterry argues, [D] the risen Christ is able to revivify human consciousness so that the human mind “comes forth from the bosome of his idea, replenished with the Ideas of all things.” Having thus renewed human consciousness with the fullness of all creatures’ intelligibility, Sterry suggests that [E] Christ is able through human consciousness to bring about the resurrection of all creatures, precisely by “rising” in them all as humanity knows them in their full reality, exterior to human consciousness: “he riseth again in all the particular Forms of things,” says Sterry, “in their own proper Existencies.” Thus Sterry draws together in great intimacy—just as one would expect in so ebullient an exponent of the divine ideas teaching—the resurrection of Christ as the restoration of God’s true ideas for all creatures and, as well, the contemplative role of human consciousness in replenishing this divine truth at the

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heart of all creatures. Sterry would appear to confirm my hunch that human contemplative awareness is a function of the risen Christ, bringing all beings to the fullness of their divine life—precisely by drawing human consciousness through the death of the world’s misconstruction of reality and into the infinite life of God’s truth.

Beatitude: Sharing in God’s Knowing and Loving of All Creatures In this chapter we have considered how the lens of the divine ideas brings into focus the overarching and constitutive role of God’s knowing and loving. This both encloses the distinction between creatures and Creator within the infinite “othering” of the Trinity, and also vivifies creaturely knowing—whether in this life or the life to come—with the power of God’s knowing and loving. I have presented this discussion according to the order of being, that is, beginning with God; but we could equally well have proceeded according to the order of learning, in which case it seems most likely that Christian reflection upon this intimate presence of Trinitarian life within our lives would have begun in the light of Christ’s dying and rising. Wondering at what God has done within them and for them in Christ, Christians of the first several centuries began to conceive of what God in Godself must be like in order for the incarnation, death, resurrection, and sending of the Holy Spirit to have taken place within our world. And as their reflection upon God the Trinity developed, Christian thinkers employed their belief that God eternally knows and loves all creatures in the divine ideas in order to shed light on two questions: how do our minds participate in the divine truth in order to know the truth of our fellow creatures?; and how do our minds come to participate in God’s own knowing of Godself in beatitude? And it is this question with which we conclude this theological essay about the role and significance of the divine ideas in Christian life and thought. In the beatific vision we come to perhaps a very literal appreciation of St. Paul’s conviction: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). For it is indeed precisely by coming to know God by means of God’s own knowing of Godself and of ourselves in God that, Christians believe, we are glorified and blessed with the vision of God. That, indeed, is why Paul can say that faith and hope come to an end, though love remains forever: we will no

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longer need to have faith or hope because we shall, Christians believe, see, know, and enjoy God who is Truth and Goodness itself. The Christian belief that humankind can only be ultimately fulfilled by knowing a reality, God, that exceeds the capacity of our human minds provides one of the richest mysteries for faith to explore in search of understanding. It was only natural that some thinkers would alleviate the paradox by attenuating one end or the other: so, it might be argued that in beatitude what really happens is that the human person is simply absorbed into God—in other words, coming to know or see God would in such a view mean simply becoming one with God without apparently any human remainder; more often, however, it might be argued that what human beings come to see or know in the vision of God is really not God in Godself but a symbolic theophany of God fit for human perception. Either of these approaches “solves” the mystery of the beatific vision quite handily; by contrast, it is testimony to Aquinas’ profound confidence in God’s infinite desire to gift human capacities, in a way that fulfills them rather than replaces them, that he insists on holding firmly to both ends of the paradox of beatitude. For as the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of the intellect; if we suppose that the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else besides God; which is opposed to faith. For the ultimate perfection of the rational creature is to be found in that which is the principle of its being; since a thing is perfect so far as it attains to its principle . . . . [Also] there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees; and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.²³

Thomas invites his readers to think about why it is that God and God alone should fulfill the highest capacity and the deepest desire of the human person. Why, in other words, should “seeing” which is to say knowing God be the consummation of humankind? What is it in God, we might ask, that human beings need to behold in order fully to become themselves? Here the implicit role of the divine ideas teaching becomes intriguingly apparent—and this in two distinct ways. First Thomas explains that the fulfillment of our highest capacity—which he believes is our ability to

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understand reality—reaches its apex in coming to understand the very principle or source of our own being, in a sense, that is, to return to unity or harmony with that fundamental idea or truth from which we spring: “For the ultimate perfection of the rational creature is to be found in that which is the principle of its being; since a thing is perfect so far as it attains to its principle.” In other words, I am arguing, to attain to our principle, as Thomas puts it, would mean to know God as our source—and more particularly to share in that divine knowing of Godself that includes God’s idea of ourselves. Notice that this attainment of our principle implicitly invokes the creative exemplar role of the divine ideas; Thomas’ next point implicitly relies upon the noetic role of the ideas as eternal reasons. For, he says, wonder arises in us whenever we ponder the world around us, and this natural desire to know the causes of everything we see always summons us to a higher level of understanding that only reaches its fulfillment in God as the first cause of all that exists. But once again Thomas boldly confronts us with the fundamental question, namely how can a created mind in fact know God and not simply a created image that represents God. His argument unabashedly insists upon God’s desire and ability to unite our minds to God’s own act of self-knowing: The divine essence is existence itself. Hence as other intelligible forms, which are not identical with their existence, are united to the mind according to a sort of mental existence by which they inform and actualize the mind, so the divine essence is united to a created mind so as to be what is actually understood and, through its very self, making the mind actually understanding.²⁴

For Thomas, the mind moves towards understanding anything when it is actualized, fulfilled as intellect, precisely by thinking the intelligible form (the idea) of the object it seeks to understand. And in beatitude, says Thomas, the divine essence gives itself to be the idea that actualizes the human mind. So the divine ideas play a crucial mediating role in humanity’s journey towards beatitude: implicitly present as embodied in creaturely existence, illuminatingly reflected within the Scriptures and the church’s teaching, the ideas awaken and arouse the one who seeks to understand towards an ever fuller seeing—that is, when the divine idea of what one longs to understand will become the intelligible form by which the mind knows. Not surprisingly, then, the ultimate consummation of earthly theology, the beatific vision, was certainly understood by Thomas to mean a

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sharing in God’s own knowing and loving of Godself: an invitation to behold not only all creatures as they exist in their imperishable truth and beauty as God knows them, but to behold God as God knows God—to behold God by God’s own Idea (or Word) of God. As Herbert McCabe puts it, when in the beatific vision humans come to know the essence of God, “the mind is not realized by a form which is a likeness of God, but by God himself. God will not simply be the object of our minds, but the actual life by which our minds are what they will have become.”²⁵ We could look at it this way: in the eternal Idea by which God knows God (the begetting of the Word), God also knows the divine ideas, i.e., all the ways in which creatures participate in the divine gift of existence—these ideas live eternally within the Word; it is very apt, then, that the consummation of faith in search of understanding should be to pass from a contemplation of the divine ideas as they are expressed in time, to the contemplation of them as they are eternally in the Word, in order that, at last, their light should be subsumed as believers are drawn within the very source of the ideas’ luminosity, the Light from Light. In a sense, we could say, the process of coming to know things by means of their divine ideas would thus always, already, be oriented towards this ultimate goal: the deepening of contemplative consciousness, when hearing the Logos echoing at the ground of all creaturely logoi would give way to seeing all things in the Word, and when in the life to come beholding all the ideas in the Word would pass over into being in the Word to see God—being united to that act of knowing which is none other than God’s own Idea of God. Now that we have considered a representative view of beatitude in its most sweeping terms, I want to suggest in richer detail how the divine ideas teaching is at work in Christian reflection upon the vision of God. It will be helpful to recall that for Thomas the process of knowing, even in beatitude, requires both (a) the power of the intellect to know things and also (b) the object that the mind seeks to understand. In the second section of this chapter we talked about how in Thomas’ view our natural light of reason is already a gift from God, a participation in God’s own infinite power of knowing which includes God’s knowing of all the ways in which creatures will come to exist. Thomas, you recall, refers to this knowledge of the divine ideas as the eternal uncreated light. While the blessed in heaven share in God’s knowledge of the divine ideas as objects of knowledge, for those on earth the divine ideas are not seen directly but rather God’s infinite knowing of Godself (which includes the ideas of all things) shines as a power or light within our created minds.

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But now when Thomas comes to discuss the vision of the blessed, he does indeed suggest that part of what fulfills and beatifies them is their vision of all things in God. While Thomas is careful to insist that the vision of the blessed is never comprehensive—God as infinite life can never be fully grasped, Thomas does point to the consummating vision made possible by God’s knowing of Godself and of all things in God. He discusses this in a most significant way in the Summa Theologiae at Q12. Article 8, where he asks “Whether those who see the essence of God see all in God?” As I just pointed out, Thomas naturally insists that even the blessed who do indeed see the essence of God are unable fully to comprehend, as creatures, the infinite reality of the divine, although they enjoy beholding as much of the divine beauty, truth, and goodness as their minds and hearts are capable of apprehending. (Thomas emphasizes that the more one loves, the more one is drawn to behold in God.) Nonetheless, in spite of this qualification, it is crucial to notice how much Thomas envisions as included in the knowledge of the blessed. Thus for example in one of the objections, Thomas allows that “all actual or possible things shine forth in God as in a mirror; for He knows all things in Himself.” The image of the divine essence as a mirror reflecting God’s knowledge of Godself not only appeals to the reader’s wonder at the infinite beauty of the divine reality but also, I believe, reminds us that it is in the perfect image or reflection or idea that God has of Godself—namely the eternal Word—that “all actual or possible things shine forth.” As Thomas develops his thoughts in this important article, we can see him gradually evoking within his readers some sense of the mysterious and ongoing conversion of consciousness that beatitude must bring—an ongoing conversion that, as we saw in Chapter 4, entails a shift from wondering at the truth and meaning of our fellow creatures as objects around us, to sharing in their Author’s creative understanding of them. So he allows that “the natural desire of the rational creature is to know everything that belongs to the perfection of the intellect, namely, the species and the genera of things and their types, and these everyone who sees the Divine essence will see in God.” Our native yearning to understand the mysterious depth and meaning of our fellow creatures will indeed be satisfied by beholding God’s own idea of each of them in God’s knowing of Godself. But, says Thomas, perhaps the unending journey into the truth and goodness of God will in some sense detach us from thinking about all beings according to what we think of as “our own” point of view, and draw us beyond ourselves into that infinite understanding which is simply God: for “if God alone were seen, Who is the fount and principle of all being and of all truth, He would

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so fill the natural desire of knowledge that nothing else would be desired, and the seer would be completely beatified.” Maximus the Confessor had suggested much the same, encouraging his readers to consider the way in which their intimacy with the divine life would transform their consciousness: “For those who enjoy fellowship with God, who is infinite and beautiful, desire becomes more intense and has no limit.”²⁶ Bonaventure provides a particularly thought-provoking discussion of this transformative or ecstatic aspect of the vision of God. In his examination of the paradigmatic knowledge of Christ, Bonaventure emphasizes how it is that in beatitude the human knower is drawn ever more fully into the divine reality it seeks to understand: Therefore, despite the fact that it is unified with the Word, the soul of Christ does not comprehend an infinite number of things since it is a creature and is therefore limited; for it is neither equal to nor greater than the Word. And therefore, the soul does not grasp these things in their totality. Rather, the soul is taken captive by them, and thus it is drawn not by comprehensive knowledge but rather by an ecstatic knowledge. I call this an ecstatic knowledge, not because the subject exceeds the object, but because the subject is drawn toward an object that exceeds it in a certain ecstatic mode that draws the soul beyond itself.²⁷

We should note first of all the crucial initial fact, namely that for Christians the beatific vision is entirely grounded in the soul’s union with the eternal Word, in whom dwell the divine ideas of all reality. For the Word simply is the Father’s eternal knowing of all things in the divine essence. Like Thomas, Bonaventure confirms that no creature, not even the humanity of Christ united hypostatically to the Word, can comprehend the infinity of divine reality. Nonetheless there is a beautiful and indeed mysterious sense, argues Bonaventure, in which the soul advances towards some apprehension of the divine life. But this is an advance preeminently sustained by the infinite reality of God drawing the soul beyond itself into what Bonaventure calls an ecstatic knowledge. This is particularly worth pondering because in the standard epistemology of Bonaventure’s day, human knowledge of an object is limited within the capacity of the mind which has been actualized by the intelligible form of the object; and therefore knowledge is constrained within the particular mode of consciousness of the one who knows. Yet Bonaventure insists that in beatitude “the subject is drawn toward an object that exceeds it.” In suggesting that God’s infinity draws the mind beyond itself

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into a kind of knowing within the object rather than in the subject of the knowledge event, Bonaventure is very likely suggesting that in beatitude our knowledge is really no longer “ours” but rather a participation in God’s own knowledge of Godself. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest at the end of this chapter how the divine ideas might enrich our understanding of the ecstatic knowledge Bonaventure describes—in which the knowing subject seems to be drawn beyond itself and yet is itself a knower. Eriugena for example clearly conceives the epistemological issue at stake in beatitude according to the standard model, and yet he certainly understands beatitude to involve a fundamental transformation of human consciousness. And if every subject that has unobscured intelligible knowledge becomes one with the object of the intelligible knowledge, why should not our nature when it contemplates God face to face become, in those who are worthy and as far as the capacity of our nature for contemplation allows, by its ascent into the cloud of contemplation become One with Him and within Him?²⁸

In the normal course of human cognition, Eriugena confirms, the subject “becomes one with the object of the intelligible knowledge.” But, as we noted above, most thinkers understand this union to be constrained within the mode of the subject’s knowing. In other words, the subject may indeed become one with the object of its knowledge, but this would normally mean that the “object” now exists only within the capacity and scope of the knowing subject; a state of being that Eriugena would heartily wish to deny is the case in beatitude. For then, he says, human nature should be united to God “by its ascent into the cloud of contemplation [and so] become one with him and within him.” This “within him” clearly affirms the notion of a knower coming to exist within the reality that it seeks to know. Perhaps we could even say that, for many of our thinkers, in beatitude the human knowing subject in some way becomes transparent to, or is subsumed within, the divine knowing subject, namely God. But how exactly might this occur without the creaturely subject seeming to vanish altogether? We can, I believe, more adequately consider Christian faith in the beatific vision by reemphasizing that beatitude takes place within the life of the Trinity. And this would help us to understand how the knowing human subject does not simply vanish into the one Creator, but rather finds a

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“place” within the eternal Word, and thus, within the second Person of the Trinity, the human person shares in the eternal knowing and delight of the Trinitarian Persons. Origen had indeed already suggested as much by describing the beatific contemplation as a participation in the filial relationship of the Son to the Father: For at that time those who have come to God because of the Word which is with him will have the contemplation of God as the only activity, that, having been accurately formed in the knowledge of the Father, they may all thus become a son, since now the Son alone has known the Father.²⁹

Origen understands the Word’s mission as drawing rational beings into his own filial relationship with the Father, thus establishing within creaturely knowers a participation in the Trinitarian self-knowing. In a sense, we could say, creaturely consciousness is centered within the Son and opened beyond itself to share in that ultimate self-awareness who is God. Indeed for some exponents of the divine ideas tradition this transformation of consciousness is always a possibility, insofar as a creaturely being awakens to its true identity in the Word. Bernard McGinn comments on precisely this notion in the teaching of Meister Eckhart, for whom Jesus Christ is most profoundly understood as “the God-man whose taking on of general human nature makes possible our becoming aware of what is always happening in the now of eternity—the birth of the Word from the Father in the depths of the soul.”³⁰ For Eckhart, McGinn suggests, the assumption of our humanity in Christ into union with the eternal Word enables a dawning recognition within human consciousness—namely that we exist as creatures in and with, indeed in identity with, the continual speaking of the Word by the Father. The divine ideas teaching helps Christian thinkers to ponder how the human creaturely self is not separate or divorced from its eternal reality in the Father’s giving birth to the Word, but is in some sense a form of consciousness that is continually invited towards conversion and expansion into unity with its identity in the Word. We have already seen that the Christian belief in beatitude includes belief in the possibility of seeing and understanding the truth of many creaturely realities as they exist in the mind of God. But it is equally evident that the divine ideas teaching envisions the blessed in heaven being drawn into an awareness of unity or continuity with their divine idea in God. In a passage that most beautifully emphasizes the imperishable goodness of the creatures’

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ideas in God, Eriugena discusses the meaning of Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel (14:2) that in his Father’s house are many mansions: In the halls of this house, all men will possess mansions when they return into their Causes, whether their time on earth was spent well or ill. For no man can spoil its beauty or debase its honor or subtract from or add to its spaciousness. For what could be excluded from it or what could be unable to enter into it, seeing that in it no man’s baseness is base, no malice harms it, no deceit deceives it, no wickedness of unclean spirits or irrational impulses of evil men contaminate its beauty.³¹

For Eriugena, to enter into the life of God means a return into one’s primordial cause, the divine knowing and loving of oneself that is the infinite reality of God, and of oneself within God. In the undoubtedly perilous and challenging times of the early Middle Ages, Eriugena’s confidence in the imperishability of God’s goodness and of the creatures’ welcome home therein surely spoke powerfully to his readers. To know that one truly belongs in a dwelling place where no “irrational impulses of evil men” can ever “contaminate its beauty” would surely move creaturely consciousness towards that unending conversion which marks the vision of God. Aquinas himself, commenting on the vision of Christ’s human nature made possible by his union with the divine nature in the Person of the Word, observes not only that the “soul of Christ knows all things in the Word,” but also that “no beatified intellect fails to know in the Word whatever pertains to itself.”³² Again, my suggestion is that the divine ideas teaching encourages a sense that in beatitude humankind beholds and finally understands the deep truth of themselves. The vision of God would seem to include a reconciliation with the everlastingly known and loved reality of oneself in God, a “self” that is also nothing less than God’s own life in the infinite act of self-understanding. We can see the long-standing coherence of this aspect of the divine ideas teaching by considering its role in the eschatological thought of Marsilio Ficino. For the great Renaissance Christian Platonist, all contemplative practice is undoubtedly a preparation for eternity, for, he proposes, when our mind enjoys physical beauty, it is really “loving the shadow of God” so that “ . . . in this life we shall love God in all things so that in the next we may love all things in God . . . . for living in this way we shall proceed to the point where we shall see both God and all things in God, and love both Him, and all things which are in Him.”³³ We can notice the eschatological momentum

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here, drawing the contemplative onwards to that fullness which is now perceptible but not yet within reach. Ficino had often spoken of a need for healing and re-harmonizing of the contemplative vision, using the metaphor of music—the ravishing beauty of the divine music “in the eternal mind of God,” arousing the mind to a desire that subsumes the desire for earthly beauty: by hearing this celestial harmony “ . . . the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music, by which it is led back its rightful home, so that it may enjoy that true music again.”³⁴ Interestingly, however, one of Ficino’s most powerful accounts of such a cleansing ascent or restoration of the contemplative mind comes not in a general Christian Platonic pattern, but in a more specifically Christian participation in the Paschal mystery. Commenting on The Divine Names, Ficino observes that we only need the whole apparatus of affirmations and negations in speaking of God because our beings have not yet passed through the dying away of our fallen misperception of reality and into the full splendor of God’s infinite truth; and this will happen, just as the sun awakens seed in the womb of the earth, when Christ’s risen body will give birth to new humanity. The body, mind, and soul of Christ will re-condition and shine forth within the human person, and the contemplative will rejoice in “the soul of Christ shining forth in our understanding,” and God will at last “unite [our] mind to Himself ” so that the mind will be “formed by God through God Himself.”³⁵ In a sense, we might say that for Ficino, the beatific fulfillment of the contemplative vocation is fundamentally a Paschal event, a transformation of the human capacity for intelligible vision through the death of the false knowing of reality. And this happens, Ficino suggests, by means of a sharing in that ultimate knowing by the Father of the Son which, in our world, manifests itself as the resurrection of Christ from the dead and Christ’s new body the church in him. As I have throughout this book, I’m proposing here that the act by which the Father knows himself eternally in the begetting of the Son (and all the ways in which the creatures participate existence by God’s gift) is isomorphic with the act by which the Father acknowledges and vindicates his beloved Son in the resurrection, and this is isomorphic, as well, with the act by which in beatitude God gives his own Word, the eternal Idea of himself, to be the form or idea by which the blessed see and know God. In other words, once again, the eternal divine self-knowing—within which takes place the infinite act of knowing of all the creatures in the Word (represented by the divine ideas)— is the ground and basis for the both the truth and life of creatures and also the saving source of the contemplative’s vision.

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Ficino gives a particularly lovely expression of this co-inherence of the creatures’ final destiny with the contemplative’s own. Speaking of those who journey via the contemplative turn from the finite forms of things to their ultimate reality in God, he writes of the effect of this ascent on the contemplative as well. He says: Anyone who surrenders himself to God with love in this life will recover himself in God in the next life. Such a man will certainly return to his own Idea, the Idea by which he was created. There any defect in him will be corrected again; he will be united with his Idea forever. For the true man and the Idea of a man are the same. For this reason as long as we are in this life, separated from God, none of us is a true man, for we are separated from our own Idea or Form. To it, divine love and piety will lead us. Even though we may be dismembered and mutilated here, then, joined by love to our own Idea, we shall become whole men, so that we shall seem to have first worshipped God in things, in order later to worship things in God, and to worship things in God for this reason, in order to recover ourselves in Him above all.³⁶

In tracing the contemplative’s journey into God, Ficino makes wonderfully clear this great, redemptive surprise; for in learning to apprehend the divine truth of all the creatures, contemplatives are also drawn by divine love into the first and final truth of themselves as well. Ficino’s observations lead us to consider some final mysteries at the heart of the divine ideas teaching, especially when it is at work within Christian eschatology. As we’ve seen above, for Aquinas and other exponents of the divine ideas tradition, a particular question arises in considering the beatific vision when God in Godself is the object of human knowing; Thomas clearly insists that no created intelligible form could be the basis for a true vision of God and therefore God alone must be the intelligible form by which the human mind glimpses the reality of God. But this poses a difficulty we have met before: the standard view to which Thomas subscribes holds that the object of the knower is present as an intelligible form according to the mode of a given knower—but how could God really be present if God is confined to a human mode of knowing the intelligible? Let me consider this question once again but now with a deeper sense of how the divine ideas tradition might help us. I believe one possible response to this question would be to remind ourselves that within the idea by which God knows Godself, namely the

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Word, God knows Godself as participated by all rational creatures— including of course the particular human person who has been brought to the vision of God. So might we not propose this as a solution to the problem of how God could really be present according to the mode of a human knower? For perhaps we might say that a real vision of God is possible without either (a) substituting a creaturely form of intelligibility for God’s own reality or (b) denying the human person’s own mode of knowing (enhanced by the power of the light of glory) as the real mode within which God is known. This might be possible if we consider, at least hypothetically, that a human person’s beatitude consists in participating God’s knowing of Godself—by means of the unique divine idea of that human knower who has been brought to beatitude. In other words the beatified human being is the union of her earthly finite expression and her eternal self within God’s knowing of Godself, that is, her divine idea. Thus at least one aspect of the joy of beatitude would be the discovery that God has chosen never to be God apart from oneself, and that this eternal knowing and loving of oneself in God is wonderfully given to be the means by which a human person comes to participate in God’s own beatitude. And this observation about beatitude brings us to a further question regarding the nature of the relationship between the divine ideas in God and their creaturely expression in time. As I pointed out in the introduction, there is without question a range of opinions regarding this mystery. At one end of the spectrum would be views that understand the relationship between the divine ideas and their expression in time as entirely distinct and separate realities—perhaps the analogy would be the relationship between an actual being and a representation of that being such as a painting or a statue. At the other end of the spectrum would be views that understand the kinship between the divine ideas and their creaturely expression as far more intimate, indeed as not dualistic at all; here perhaps, as represented for example by Eriugena and Eckhart, the distinction between the heavenly and earthly forms would be more a matter of consciousness, a matter of the earthly form of life being drawn by the grace of contemplation to an awakening in which the fullness of one’s identity in God and of one’s unity with all other beings becomes more and more accessible. In my own view there are good reasons to support either of these positions, but I would argue that the crucial factor in pondering this mystery is the role of Christ in bringing the whole creation into that fullness of life in God that God has always, Christians believe, intended for all creatures. The goodness and reality of Christ’s human existence in time, including his authentic struggle

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to embody within every circumstance of our world the truth of God’s meaning, God’s Word—this Christological factor demands that a theology open to the divine ideas teaching take with profound seriousness the question of the meaning and purpose of creaturely existence. Surely the finite material embodied lives of God’s creatures are not, in light of the Incarnation, to be viewed as a merely negative dilemma, an entrapment in time to be overcome by an ascent to purely spiritual reality in beatitude? And so the question arises, what is the divine meaning inherent in our earthly struggle to fulfill the personal calling and gifts that comprise our embodied existence—especially in the light of the fact that we know ourselves to be mortal, that all we have loved and sought to achieve will need to be surrendered. How does this ultimate mystery of human existence find any illumination from the divine ideas tradition? Needless to say such a question could never be answered satisfactorily within an entire book, let alone a brief conclusion. But perhaps I might attempt to sketch in outline the central insights that I believe the divine ideas teaching could offer us in reflecting upon this deep existential question. First, as we have noted throughout this book, the divine ideas, which are the exemplars for all creaturely beings, are themselves aspects of the eternal relational self-knowing and loving of the Trinity. This means that all creatures, and perhaps especially rational beings with freedom to choose how they enact their existence, enjoy fundamentally relational identities— that is, our personhood, that which makes us who we are, is not isolated “within” us as some private aspect of our biology or psychology. Rather our grounding in God’s knowing and loving of us means that our identities are discovered and developed through the history of our interactions with others, and especially with the divine Other—in likeness to the relational personhood of the Trinity. And second, the self-sharing and self-communication through which we become who we are with others are meant to be life-giving and gracious moments of fulfillment, expressing in time the eternal self-sharing generosity of the Trinity within which our exemplar truth exists imperishably. Third, the devastation that sin inflicts upon the creation distorts this fundamental calling within ourselves to be with and for others, rendering this calling dangerous and fearful; this pervasive distortion of the truth of our relational identity as known in the divine ideas shadows every phase of human life, but it culminates in the tragic metamorphosis of what might have been our most consummate act of self-giving relationality—into the fearful and grievous suffering of death.

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Fourth, as I have argued, the incarnation and Paschal mystery of the eternal Word reconnects each creature with its truth in the Word and makes possible, through the self-giving love of Jesus Christ, the consummating selfdonation of the creatures to each other and ultimately to God. In the resurrection of Christ, God reveals the deep truth of our finite creaturely calling in time; namely that it is not simply a negative result of some primordial fall into embodied existence but rather that it is a reflection of God the Trinity’s desire and delight to give existence to what is profoundly other than Godself, and to grace this creaturely existence with a likeness to the eternal Trinitarian self-giving—namely the opportunity to fulfill our relational identities precisely by giving ourselves away in love and freedom to the other. While the sin of the world poisons this possibility that God created us to enjoy in likeness to the Trinity, the dying and rising of Christ makes present within our world the imperishable self-giving of our exemplar ideas, existing as they do within the eternal Trinitarian self-giving. Thus, Christians believe, through fidelity to Christ, his victorious self-giving works within the creatures the freedom to make this fundamental self-donation, through the medium of time and embodied existence—a profound selfdonation that is in fact the fulfillment of our imperishably self-donating Trinitarian truth in God. And finally, as creatures are enabled in Christ to fulfill the relational nature of their identities, they are made whole again with God’s knowing and loving of their truth, their divine ideas; and this means that they are made one within the eternal event of God’s knowing of Godself in the Word, and in this way come to share in the beatitude within which the Father knows all things in the Son within the eternal joy of the Holy Spirit.

Notes 1. See Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Oration on Pascha (Oration 45), discussed by Maximus the Confessor, in Ambiguum 45. 2. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon V.979B, p. 663. 3. Augustine, The Trinity IV.4, trans. Edmund Hill, pp. 154–155. 4. Augustine, The Trinity IV.1.3, p. 154. 5. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, in On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 57–58.

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6. John Scotus Eriugena, Homily on the Gospel of John 7, in Eriugena, trans. O’Meara, pp. 163, 165. 7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV.42.3, p. 198. 8. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.16.5. 9. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.26.2. 10. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.26.2. 11. Bernard McGinn, “Eriugena Mysticus,” in Giovanni Scoto nel Suo Tempo. L’Organizzazione del Sapera in Età Carolingia, atti del XXIV Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 11–14 1987 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1989), 235–260 (239). 12. John Scotus Eriugena, Homily on the Gospel of John 7, in Eriugena, trans. O’Meara, p. 168. 13. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.85.5, Response. 14. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.85.5, Response. 15. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia.85.5, Response. 16. Augustine, “On Free Will,” II. xvi. 41, p. 161, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953). 17. Joshua Lollar, To See Into The Life of Things: The Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor and His Predecessors (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 302–304. 18. Lollar, To See Into The Life of Things, p. 314. 19. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, in On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Blowers and Wilken, pp. 56–57. 20. Maximus the Confessor, Ad Thalassium 60, in On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Blowers and Wilken, p. 128. 21. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, in On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Blowers and Wilken, pp. 59–60. 22. Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedome of the Will Part I (London: John Starkey, 1675), 128–31. 23. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia.12.1, Response, in Summa Theologiae Vol. 3: Knowing and Naming God (Ia.12–13), trans. Herbert McCabe O.P. (New York: Blackfriars, 1964). 24. St. Thomas Aquinas, Ia.12.2, Reply Obj. 3, trans. McCabe O.P. 25. Herbert McCabe, Appendix 1 in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia. 12–13, trans. Herbert McCabe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), p. 100. 26. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, in On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Blowers and Wilken, pp. 64–65. 27. Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure Vol. IV: Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, trans. Zachary Hayes (Saint Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1992), 187. 28. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon V. 876B–C, p. 541.

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29. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, Books 1–10, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 52. 30. McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, p. 142. 31. John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon V. 982C–D, p. 667. 32. Thomas Aquinas, ST III.10.2, resp.. 33. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, Speech VI, Chap. 19, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), 144–5. 34. Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol. 1, 7, trans. Language Department of the School of Economic Science (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975), 45. 35. Marsilio Ficino, On Dionysius the Areopagite, Vol. 1: Mystical Theology and The Divine Names, Part I, trans. Michael J. B. Allen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 137, 139. 36. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on the Symposium on Love, Speech VI, Chap. 19, p. 145.

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Ponticus Evagrius. “Chapters on Prayer.” In The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981. Porta, John Baptista. Natural Magick. London, 1658. Principe, Laurence M. The Scientific Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pseudo-Dionysius. Divine Names. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Work, trans. Colm Luibheid. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987. Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stark, Ryan J. Rhetoric, Science and Magic in Seventeenth Century England. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Sterry, Peter. A Discourse of the Freedome of the Will. London: John Starkey, 1675. Szőnyi, György E. John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2004. Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007. Tollefsen, Torstein Theodor. The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Traherne, Thomas. Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Van Nieuwenhove, Rik. An Introduction to Medieval Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Van Riel, Gerd. “Introduction.” In Platonic Ideas and Concept Formation in Ancient and Medieval Thought, ed. Gerd Van Riel and Caroline Macé. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004. Watson, Robert N. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 1998. Weil, Simone. “Forms of the Implicit Love of God.” In Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. William of St. Thierry. The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu, trans. Theodore Berkeley. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971. Wippel, John F. The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Alan, of Lille 30–1 alchemy 70–2, 74, 77, 129 Allen, Michael J. B. 142 angels 5, 12, 21, 28, 146, 176–7 beholding the Word 36–7 contemplative role 10, 24, 133–4, 142–3 and the human restoration of creation’s unity 149–50 nourishing 9–10 Anselm, of Canterbury 19, 107–8 Monologion, on the truth-bearing Word 95–6 Aquinas, Thomas 3, 35–7 assimilation of creatures to the Word 106–9 beatitude and divine truth 167–71 beatitude and God’s knowing 189–93, 196 beatitude and human knowing 173–6, 198 the contemplative calling of rational creatures 144–7 the fulfillment of a healthy consciousness 133 God’s knowing and creatures’ likeness 33 human understanding 36–8 intelligibility of creation 19, 24–5, 44–7 the intelligible beauty of creation 27–8 Summa theologiae 108–9, 173–4, 192 Trinitarian love and joy 87–8, 184–5 Trinitarian vision of the cosmos 12–13 Word’s self-communication and creation’s intelligibility 59 Augustine, of Hippo 13–14, 19, 26–7, 36–7, 67, 104 the contemplative calling of rational creatures 142–3 divine goodness 119–21 the failure of the contemplative calling 132–3 human understanding 166, 174–5 the location of ideas 21–6

Resurrection and renewal of consciousness 157–8 the salvific significance of the Word 92–4 The Trinity 85–7, 106–7, 119–20, 157–8 truth 167–9 wisdom 177–8 wisdom and the intelligibility of creation 43, 49–52 Bacon, Francis 76, 129–30 Advancement of Learning 75 Novum Organum 75–6 beatitude 10, 100, 161 and human knowing 166, 171–8 and the inclusive plenitude of truth 166–71 sharing God’s loving and knowing 188–201 beauty 1–2, 8–9, 19–20, 152 authentic vs. truthfulness 41–2 and the awakening of consciousness 156 of bodiliness, and truthfulness of divine ideas 21 of creation, intelligibility of 26–9, 32–3, 43–57, 177–8 Trinitarian, and Salvation 89–90 in the Word 93, 103–4, 112–13 Bede, the Venerable 9–10 Blumenberg, Hans 63–4, 66 bodiliness and the intelligibility of ideas 19–21 and the transformation of consciousness 149 Boehme, Jacob 17–18 Bonaventure 2–3, 49, 145, 150 assimilation of creatures to the Word 106–8 beatitude and God’s knowing 193–4 contemplation and reunification with the truth 32–3

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Bonaventure (cont.) contemplation and Wisdom 109–10 contemplation of God’s ideas 134–5 contemplation of the eternal knowing 123–4 the contemplative calling of rational creatures 147–8 creation’s intelligibility 28, 49, 52–4, 58–9, 66–7, 111–13 creation’s word-fullness 140 the incarnation of the Word 65–6, 110–11 the truth-bearing Word 96–7 Book of Revelation 9 Bouyer, Louis 100–1 Catherine, of Siena, Saint 13–14 and the eternal divine delight 90–1 Clément, Olivier 30 Colossians 34 consciousness, awakening / transformation 5–7, 70 awareness of mysterious communication of things 130 and contemplation 120–2 contemplative calling of rational creatures 142–8 and the Paschal mystery 138–9, 157–61 perception of creation’s intelligibility 43, 54 perception of divine goodness 120–1, 126–7 return of creation 148–57 and the salvific significance of the Word 91–5, 98–100, 140 unified and renewed, and beatitude 171–2, 187–8, 192–6 weakened and failure of 133–4, 179–80 contemplation / contemplative calling 5, 15–16, 85–6, 93 of creation 21, 42–4, 48–9, 55, 59–60, 68–9, 136–57 of divine love and goodness 7–9, 119–21, 126–8 of divine truth and beatitude 171, 179–82, 190–1, 194–8 effects of sin on 111–12 failure of recognition of 132–4 of the formal significance of divine ideas 35–8 of God’s mystical communication 124–136

and humanity’s fulfillment 112–13 of rational creatures 10, 112–13, 142–8 and Resurrection / Paschal mystery 30–4, 119, 121–4, 137–9, 158–61, 187–8 and Wisdom 109–10 of the Word, and Salvation 103–4, 113–14 Copenhaver, Brian 71–2 Corinthians, First Epistle to 54, 188–9 Corinthians, Second Epistle to 138 Creation 1–2, 5–6, 12, 166 contemplative calling of 123–4, 136–57 falling / distortion 182, 200 intelligibility, intelligible beauty 21, 26–9, 41–80 new, and Resurrection 185–8 as participation in divine self-giving 13, 23–4 and the Paschal mystery 157–61 re-creation, salvation, and the incarnate truth-bearing Word 29–30, 32–3, 35, 85–91, 94, 102, 107–8, 112–13, 123–4 and the self-communication of the Word 54–9 the Tree of Life 165–6 and Wisdom 43–54, 109 Dee, John 74 disenchantment influence on contemplation, in C.S. Lewis 47, 49–50 narratives 59–69, 124–5 divine ideas 1–2 formal significance 35–8 intelligibility 18–23, 26–8, 32, 36–7 location 21–4 material significance 21–34 and the mystery of Trinity 12–16 noetic vs. metaphysical understanding 4–7 reflections on the modern notion of 16–18 Duns Scotus, John 63, 65–7 Dupré, Louis 63–8, 78–9 Eagleton, Terry 68 Ecclesiastes 75 Eco, Umberto 43–4 Eden humanity’s exile from 181–2 lost language 70, 74, 79

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Edmundson, Mark Nightmare on Mainstreet: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic 61–2 Eriugena, John Scotus 106–8, 145, 165–6, 175, 199–200 beatitude and God’s knowing 194–6 beatitude and human knowing 172–3 and the contemplative calling 143–4, 147, 154 and the fulfillment of a unified consciousness 171–2 Homily to the Prologue of John 102–3 and the Paschal mystery 65, 109 sharing divine self-communication 123–4, 133–4 transformation of consciousness and return to creation 156 and truth 167–9 and the Word 54, 91–2, 94–5 the Word as rescuing and truthbearing 102–6, 113 Evagrius, Ponticus 35 evil and the imperishability of divine goodness 196 rupturing the consciousness 179–80

Hadewijch 13–14, 122 on consciousness and divine delight 94–5, 100–1 happiness see joy Hayes, Zachary 53, 110–11, 140, 147–8, 150, 159–61 Holy Spirit 169–70 and creation’s contemplative calling 137–9, 153 as infused with divine knowing and loving 7–9, 13, 25, 35, 85–6, 183–5, 188–9, 201 Hugh, of Saint-Victor 128–32, 136 human existence 200 and contemplative calling 137–8 unification to the Word 105, 110, 123–4

Ficino, Marsilio 75, 77, 95–6 beatitude and God’s knowing 196–8 the contemplative calling of rational creatures 142–3 and divine intelligible beauty 46–7 and the World-soul 71–2 Forms Bacon’s study of 75–6 Platonic 10, 17–18, 65–6, 72–3, 75, 79–80, 174–5

John’s Gospel 24, 35, 165–6, 179–80 Augustine’s commentary 49–51, 92, 167 Eriugena’s commentary 94–5, 195–6 Meister Eckhart’s commentary 57, 97 Origen’s commentary 47–9 Thomas Aquinas’ commentary 106–7 joy 26, 32, 75, 132 of beatitude 166–71, 198–9, 201 Trinitarian, and Salvation 87–91, 101

Genesis, Book of 133, 165–6, 179–80 Glanville, Joseph 73 goodness, divine 1, 8–9, 13, 32, 90, 101 human contemplation of 119–21, 125–7, 133, 141–2, 144–5 and the intelligible beauty of creation 43–4, 46, 54 of truth 167–70, 178–9, 185, 188–9, 192–3, 195–6, 199–200 Gregory, of Nyssa 20–1

Incarnation of the Word 9–11, 15, 20, 86–7, 110–11 awakening consciousness 99, 101 and contemplation 48 and creation 140, 165–6 disenchantment 65 as a medium of communication 54–5, 110–11 and Resurrection / Paschal mystery 29, 33–4, 121–2, 137–8, 157–61, 169–70, 201 salvific significance 29–30, 89–97, 104–5, 108, 113

Karnes, Michelle 159–60 Kenny, Anthony 18 Kerr, Fergus 19–20 language 70, 78–9 Lewis, C.S. 125 The Abolition of Man 125–6 on the contemplative mind 151–2 mythopoetic imagination 125–31 “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” 130

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Lewis, C.S. (cont.) review of Lord of the Rings 131 “The Weight of Glory” 126–7 likeness to God 1–2, 37–8, 98, 122, 144–7 location of ideas 21–4 Trinitarian 23–6 Lollar, Joshua 182 Lyons, Sara 61–2 magic deep 126–30 disenchanted 62 natural 71–4, 77, 124–5 Maximus, the Confessor, St. 13–14, 67, 90–1, 104, 143, 147, 193, 199–200 awakening and transformation of consciousness 98–9, 192–3 contemplative return to creation 149–50 humanity’s fall, redemption, and truth’s vindication 181–3 and truth 167–9 and the Word or Logos 29–30, 54–7, 131–2 McCabe, Herbert 190–1 McGinn, Bernard 57, 90–1, 97–9, 171–2 McKnight, Stephen 63–4 Meister Eckhart 13–14, 26–7, 90–1, 101–2 the awakening and transformation of consciousness 98–9, 156–7, 195 contemplation and resurrection 31 the power of the Word 32, 57–8, 97–8, 139–40 Merchant, Carolyn The Death of Nature 77–8 nature 14, 28–9 intelligibility 42–7, 64–5 mechanization 60–1 obscurities 69, 72–5 understandings of 76–8 Nelson, Victoria Secret Life of Puppets 61–3 Newman, Barbara 100 noetics 4–7, 47–8, 66–7, 78, 112–13, 143, 159–60, 189–90 Nominalism 14, 63–4, 67–9, 112–13 Origen 102, 106–8, 165–6 Commentary on the Song of Songs 36 contemplation of creation 36

Peri Archon 47 Trinity and beatitude 194–5 Wisdom 47–9 the Word’s self-communication 55 Paschal mystery 201 and creation’s contemplative calling 123–4, 137–8 and creation’s return 157–61 and Incarnation of the Word 29–30, 33, 65, 109 and the vindication of truth 184, 197 Paul, St. 158 on God’s knowing 188–9 on Resurrection 138–9 Perl, Eric 88–9, 135–6, 154–6 Plato 22, 37 forms 10, 17–18, 65–6, 72–3, 75, 79–80, 174–5 Timaeus 21–2 Porta, Giambattista della 75, 77 Natural Magick 71–4 prayer 7–8, 35–8 and recognition of divine goodness 121 and reflections on the World-soul 71–2 Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite 3 contemplation of God’s communication 135–6 transformation of consciousness and return to creation 154–6 Trinitarian self-donation, and Salvation 88–90 rational creatures 5, 45, 51, 112–13, 198–9 contemplative calling of 12, 119, 132, 142–8 and divine likeness 52, 176 participation in divine knowing 28, 35–6, 54, 121, 133, 137, 140, 160 and the power of Wisdom / Word 56–7, 91–3 ultimate perfection of 189–90, 192–3 reason 46 and creation 22 and the deeper magic 126–8 the “light” of, as intellectual power 172–6, 191 vs. theology 63–4 and views of reality 125–6

 Resurrection 51 and contemplation / contemplative calling 30–4, 119, 121–4, 137–9 and God’s beatitude 170 the Paschal mystery and the creation’s return 157–61 and the salvific significance of Word 104–6 and transformation of consciousness 138–9 and the vindication of Truth 12, 29–30, 178–88, 201 Romans, Epistle to 60, 141–2 Salvation 112–14 and contemplation 103–4, 113–14 and the Incarnate Word 29–30, 52, 86–7, 91–101 and the Trinitarian joy 87–91 Schiller, Friedrich 61–2 “The Gods of Greece” 60–1 self-awareness 14, 56, 147, 195 self-communication, divine 9–10, 26, 112, 121, 166, 179–80, 200 and the contemplative calling of rational creatures 131–4, 140, 151–2 and the intelligible beauty of creation 49, 55, 59 and self-sharing of truth 4 self-knowing, divine and the awakening of consciousness 98–9 and contemplation 145 and creation word-fullness 54, 93, 110, 140 and joy 167 and likeness of creatures 28, 36 and material significance of ideas 23 self-sharing 4, 10, 54, 122, 180 Trinitarian 85–6, 200 social imaginary 79–80 existence as a mystical communication 124–36 Sterry, Peter 185–8 supernatural 61–3, 68, 76

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Taylor, Charles 79–80, 131 A Secular Age 124 Traherne, Thomas 143 contemplation of creation’s wordfullness 141–2 contemplative consciousness and return to creation 150–3 transcendence, divine 61–3, 89–90, 97–8, 184–5 Trinity 1–2, 12, 29–30, 167, 174–5 and beatitude 194–5 location of ideas 23–6, 33 love and joy 87–8, 184–5 as self-donating / self-giving 89–90, 122, 184, 201 self-knowing 176 and self-sharing 10, 85–6, 200 vision of the cosmos 12–13 and the Word’s exemplarity 110, 140 Watson, Robert N. 76, 153 Weber, Max 60 “Science as a Vocation” 60–2 Webster, John 79 Weil, Simone 41–3 William, of Ockham 14, 63–8 William, of St. Thierry 7–9 Wippel, John 13 Wisdom 8–10, 27, 36, 42, 105, 124, 159–60 awakening and fulfillment of human’s consciousness 133, 141 and Christ-Logos 54–6 and contemplation 43–4, 48–9, 109–10, 154–5 and creation’s intelligibility 42–54 and the “deep magic” 126 as God’s creative knowledge 23, 92, 102, 106–7, 172 and human understanding 177–8 as a light to reason 172–3 and the likeness of God 145–6 World-soul 71–2