The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian

Mystical Theology Mark A. Mcintosh

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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

1
 3
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 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 pro-
found 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 three-
quarters 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 vio-
lence 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 contempla-
tive 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
viii 

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 dis-
ease. As my physical incapacities became more challenging, I often won-
dered 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 expres-
sion being none other than the life and relationality of God the Trinity.
Besides these thematic reflections, living with ALS also led to very prac-
tical 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!
  ix

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 enthusi-
asms 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 scholar-
ship 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 men-
tion 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.
x 

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 theolo-
gians 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
2     

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 self-
understanding and self-giving in the Son and their mutual joyful love in
the Spirit. The divine ideas, in other words, are not dependent on creatures-
to-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
  3

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 Pseudo-
Dionysius 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 in-
vestigates 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 human-
ity’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.
4     

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 hy-
potheses 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 com-
munion, 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
  5

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 intel-
ligible 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 episte-
mological 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 crea-
tures 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 intelli-
gible 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 contem-
plation 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
6     

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

d. consciousness
c. individualist
participating in
consciousness
divine ideas

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
  7

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
8     

Spirit of life, at once infuses himself by way of love and gives life to
everything, lending his assistance in prayer, in meditation or in study to
human weakness. Immediately the memory becomes wisdom and tastes
with relish the good things of the Lord, while the thoughts to which they
give rise are brought to the intellect to be formed into affections. The
understanding of the one thinking becomes the contemplation of the one
loving.²

William evokes the circumstances in which so much of Christianity’s theo-

logical 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 con-
templation 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 ana-
logically), 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
  9

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 chal-
lenges 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-as-
eternal-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 self-
communication; “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
10     

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 contin-
uation 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’ embo-
died 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 self-
communication, 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 signifi-
cance 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 theol-
ogy 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
  11

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 understand-
ing 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 expres-
sion 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
       13

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, inas-
much 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 every-
thing 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 cease-
lessly giving ground of each finite being. What God knows in the Word and
14     

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 char-
acteristics. 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 grammat-
ical 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
       15

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 imma-
nently 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 charac-
ter of intelligent speech or communication. This feature of the divine ideas
teaching sustains another fundamental feature of Christian mystical theol-
ogy: namely, that humankind has a contemplative calling—to learn by grace
16     

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 media-
tion of our fellow creatures.

Clarifying Ideas

Before going any farther I’d like to offer two clarifications. They are doubt-
less 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 analog-
ical 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 con-
ceptual grasp—even while we attempt to speak. We have to keep remember-
ing 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, differ-
ence 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 expan-
sion or at least self-awareness.³
       17

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 presup-
positions about ideas as private mental objects of our own. Moreover, the
specifically theological role of the ideas is often obscured by the hard-
working (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 con-
stitute 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 cer-
tainly 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 episte-
mology. Given such a reputation, it’s not surprising if historical and sys-
tematic theologians tend generally to give the divine ideas a fairly wide berth,
18     

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 philoso-
pher 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 divinely-
originated, universal, and communicative truth of things—a truth so illu-
minating 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 understand-
ing of ideas into what they were saying—the appearance of a shared lan-
guage hiding from us quite different realities.
       19

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 unavail-
able 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 collab-
orative interaction with the world of intelligible reality. Fergus Kerr expli-
cates 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 capa-
cities. 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 sub-
atomic nature, but what if the most fundamental nature of all things is also
conceivable (as our contemporary science suggests) as intelligible patterns of
20     

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 intelligi-
bility 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 Intelli-
gible One be able to create the intelligible qualities which by their concur-
rence with one another have engendered the nature of our bodies?⁸
       21

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 con-
templating 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 under-
stand 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
22     

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 under-
standably 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 funda-
mental 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
       23

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 Trin-
itarian 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 tradi-
tion 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
24     

reinterpreted what might at first have seemed merely an accidental

happenstance of Christianity’s historical development—namely the migra-
tion 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 loca-
tion 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 signif-
icance 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:
       25

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 empha-
sizes 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
26     

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 under-
scores 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
       27

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 cherish-
ability 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 judg-
ment 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
28     

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 sophisti-
cated 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 implica-
tions 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
       29

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 re-
created 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 move-
ment 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 pres-

ence 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
30     

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 well-
being 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 human-
ity 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 divine-
human 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
       31

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 crea-
ture’s true identity as a gift of God, to be savored in all its eternal goodness.
32     

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 every-
where, 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 non-
possessive 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 reorien-
tation of humanity’s contemplative calling within Christianity: the accept-
ance by the incarnate Word of the world’s distortion of his truth and his
       33

willing relinquishment of that untruth in death means that the contemplative

journey within Christianity can never leave embodiment behind. As Bona-
venture 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 under-
standing 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
Another random document with
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SERENE’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE;
AN INLAND STORY
Serene and young Jessup, the school-teacher, were leaning over
the front gate together in the warm summer dusk.
“See them sparkin’ out there?” inquired Serene’s father, standing
at the door with his hands in his pockets, and peering out
speculatively.
“Now, father, when you know that ain’t Serene’s line.”
It was Mrs. Sayles who spoke. Perhaps there was the echo of a
faint regret in her voice, for she wished to see her daughter “respectit
like the lave”; but “sparkin’” had never been Serene’s line.
“Serene wouldn’t know how,” said her big brother.
“There’s other things that’s a worse waste o’ time,” observed Mr.
Sayles, meditatively, “and one on ’em’s ’Doniram Jessup’s ever-
lastin’ talk-talk-talkin’ to no puppus. He’s none so smart if he does
teach school. He’d do better on the farm with his father.”
“He’s more’n three hundred dollars ahead, and goin’ to strike out
for himself, he says,” observed the big brother, admiringly.
“Huh! My son, I’ve seen smart young men strike out for
themselves ’fore ever you was born, and I’ve seen their fathers swim
out after ’em—and sink,” said Mr. Sayles, oracularly.
Outside the June twilight was deepening, but Serene and the
school-teacher still leaned tranquilly over the picket-gate. The
fragrance of the lemon-lilies that grew along the fence was in the air,
and over Serene’s left shoulder, if she had turned to look, she would
have seen the slight yellow crescent of the new moon sliding down
behind the trees.
 They were talking eagerly, but it was only about what he had
written in regard to “Theory and Practice” at the last county
examination.
“I think you carry out your ideas real well,” Serene said, admiringly,
when he had finished his exposition. “’Tisn’t everybody does that. I
know I’ve learned a good deal more this term than I ever thought to
when I started in.”
The teacher was visibly pleased. He was a slight, wiry little fellow,
with alert eyes, a cynical smile, and an expression of self-
confidence, which was justifiable only on the supposition that he had
valuable information as to his talents and capacity unknown to the
world at large.
“I think you have learned a good deal of me,” he observed,
condescendingly; “more than any of the younger ones. I have taken
some pains with you. It’s a pleasure to teach willing learners.”
At this morsel of praise, expressed in such a strikingly original
manner, Serene flushed and looked prettier than ever. She was
always pretty, this slip of a girl, with olive skin, pink cheeks, and big,
dark eyes, and she always looked a little too decorative, too fanciful,
for her environment in this substantial brick farm-house, set in the
midst of fat, level acres of good Ohio land. It was as if a Dresden
china shepherdess had been put upon their kitchen mantel-shelf.
Don Jessup stooped and picked a cluster of the pink wild
rosebuds, whose bushes were scattered along the road outside the
fence, and handed them to her with an admiring look. Why, he
scarcely knew; it is as involuntary and natural a thing for any one to
pay passing tribute to a pretty girl as for the summer wind to kiss the
clover. Serene read the momentary impulse better than he did
himself, and took the buds with deepening color and a beating heart.
“He gives them to me because he thinks I look like that,” she
thought with a quick, happy thrill.
“Yes,” he went on, rather confusedly, his mind being divided
between what he was saying and a curiosity to find out if she would
be as angry as she was the last time if he should try to kiss the
nearest pink cheek; “I think it would be a good idea for you to keep
on with your algebra by yourself, and you might read that history you
began. I don’t know who’s going to have the school next fall. Now, if I
were going to be here this summer, I——”
“Why, Don,” Serene interrupted him, using the name she had not
often spoken since Adoniram Jessup, after a couple of years in the
High School, had come back to live at home, and to teach in their
district—“why, Don, I thought your mother said you were going to
help on the farm this summer.”
Adoniram smiled, a thin-lipped, complacent little smile.
“Father did talk that some, but I’ve decided to go West—and I start
to-morrow.”
To-morrow! And that great, hungry West, which swallows up
people so remorselessly! Something ailed Serene’s heart; she hoped
he could not hear it beating, and she waited a minute before saying,
quietly:
“Isn’t this sort of sudden?”
“I don’t like to air my plans too much. There’s many a slip, you
know.”
“You’ll want to come to the house and say good-by to the folks,
and tell us all about it?” As he nodded assent, she turned and
preceded him up the narrow path.
“When will you be back?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Maybe never. If I have any luck, I’d like the old people to come
out to me. I’m not leaving anything else here.”
“You needn’t have told me so,” said Serene to herself.
“Father, boys, here’s Don come in to say good-by. He’s going
West to-morrow.”
“Well, ’Doniram Jessup! Why don’t you give us a s’prise party and
be done with it?”
 Don smiled cheerfully at this tribute to his secretive powers, and
sitting down on the edge of the porch, began to explain.
Serene glanced around to see that all were listening, and then
slipped quietly out through the kitchen to the high back porch, where
she found a seat behind the new patent “creamery,” and leaning her
head against it, indulged in the luxury of a few dry sobs. Tears she
dared not shed, for tears leave traces. Though “sparkin’” had not
been Serene’s line, love may come to any human creature, and little
Serene had learned more that spring than the teacher had meant to
impart or she to acquire.
When the five minutes she had allotted to her grief were past she
went back to the group at the front of the house as unnoticed as she
had left them. Her father was chaffing Jessup good-naturedly on his
need of more room to grow in, and Don was responding with placid
ease. It was not chaff, indeed, that could disturb his convictions as to
his personal importance to the development of the great West.
Presently he rose and shook hands with them all, including herself—
for whom he had no special word—said a general good-by, and left
them.
“He’s thinking of himself,” thought Serene a little bitterly, as she
watched him go down the yard; “he is so full of his plans and his
future he hardly knows I am here. I don’t believe he ever knew it!”
To most people the loss of the possible affection of Don Jessup
would not have seemed a heavy one, but the human heart is an
incomprehensible thing, and the next six weeks were hard for
Serene. For the first time in her life she realized how much we can
want that which we may not have, and she rebelled against the
knowledge.
“Why?” she asked herself, and “why?” Why should she have
cared, since he, it seemed, did not? Why couldn’t she stop caring
now? And, oh, why had he been so dangerously kind when he did
not care? Poor little Serene! she did not know that we involuntarily
feel a tenderness almost as exquisite as that of love itself toward
whatever feeds the fountain of our vanity.
 Presently, tired of asking herself, she turned to asking Heaven,
which is easier. For we cannot comfortably blame ourselves for the
inability to answer our own inconvenient inquiries, but Heaven we
can both ask and blame. Serene had never troubled Heaven much
before, but now, in desperation, she battered at its portals night and
day. She did not pray, you understand, to be given the love which
many small signs had taught her to believe might be hers, the love
that, nevertheless, had not come near to her. Though young, she
was reasonable. She instinctively recognized that when we cannot
be happy it is necessary for us to be comfortable, if we are still to
live. So, after a week or two of rebellion, she asked for peace, sure
that if it existed for her anywhere in the universe, God held it in His
keeping, for, now, no mortal did.
She prayed as she went about her work by day; she prayed as
she knelt by her window at evening, looking out on the star-lit world;
she prayed when she woke late in the night and found her room full
of the desolate white light of the waning moon, and always the same
prayer.
“Lord,” said Serene, “this is a little thing that I am going through.
Make me feel that it is a little thing. Make me stop caring. But if you
can’t, then show me that you care that I am not happy. If I could feel
you knew and cared, I think I might be happier.”
But in her heart she felt no answer, and peace did not come to fill
the place of happiness.
In our most miserable hours fantastic troubles and apprehensions
of the impossible often come to heap themselves upon our real
griefs, making up a load which is heavier than we can bear. Serene
began to wonder if God heard—if He was there at all.
Her people noticed that she grew thin and tired-looking, and
attributed it to the fierce hot weather. For it was the strange summer
long remembered in the inland country where they lived as the
season of the great drought. There had been a heavy snowfall late in
April; from that time till late in August no rain fell. The heat was
terrible. Dust was everywhere. The passage of time from one
scorching week to another was measured by the thickening of its
heavy inches on the highway; it rose in clouds about the feet of cattle
in the burnt-up clover-fields. The roadside grass turned to tinder, and
where a careless match had been dropped, or the ashes shaken
from a pipe, there were long, black stretches of seared ground to tell
the tale. The resurrection of the dead seemed no greater miracle
than these blackened fields should shortly turn to living green again,
under the quiet influence of autumn rains.
And now, in the early days of August, when the skies were brass,
the sun a tongue of flame, and the yellow dust pervaded the air like
an ever-thickening fog, a strange story came creeping up from the
country south of them. “Down in Paulding,” where much of the land
still lay under the primeval forest, and solitary sawmills were the
advance-guards of civilization; where there were great marshes,
deep woods, and one impenetrable tamarack swamp, seemed the
proper place for such a thing to happen if it were to happen at all.
The story was of a farmer who went out one Sunday morning to look
at his corn-field, forty good acres of newly cleared land, ploughed
this year only for the second time. The stunted stalks quivered in the
hot air, panting for water; the blades were drooping and wilted like
the leaves of a plant torn up from the ground. He looked from his
blasted crop to the pitiless skies, and, lifting a menacing hand,
cursed Heaven because of it. Those who told the story quoted the
words he used, with voices awkwardly lowered; but there was
nothing impressive in his vulgar, insensate defiance. He was merely
swearing a shade more imaginatively than was his wont. The
impressive thing was that, as he stood with upraised hand and
cursing lips, he was suddenly stricken with paralysis, and stood
rooted to the spot, holding up the threatening arm, which was never
to be lowered. This was the first story. They heard stranger things
afterward: that his family were unable to remove him from the spot;
that he was burning with an inward fire which did not consume, and
no man dared to lay hand on him, or even approach him, because of
the heat of his body.
It was said that this was clearly a judgment, and it was much
talked of and wondered over. Serene listened to these stories with a
singular exultation, and devoutly trusted that they were true. She had
needed a visible miracle, and here was one to her hand. Why should
not such things happen now as well as in Bible days? And if the Lord
descended in justice, why not in mercy? The thing she hungered for
was to know that He kept in touch with each individual human life,
that He listened, that He cared. If He heard the voice of blasphemy,
then surely He was not deaf to that of praise—or agony. She said to
herself, feverishly, “I must know, I must see for myself, if it is true.”
She said to her father: “Don’t you think I might go down to Aunt
Mari’s in Paulding for a week? It does seem as if it might be cooler
down there in the woods,” and her tired face attested her need of
change and rest. He looked at her with kindly eyes.
“Don’t s’pose it will do you no great harm, if your mother’ll manage
without you; but your Aunt Mari’s house ain’t as cool as this one,
Serene.”
“It’s different, anyhow,” said the girl, and went away to write a
postal-card to Aunt Mari and to pack her valise.
When she set out, in a day or two, it was with as high a hope as
ever French peasant maid took on pilgrimage to Loretto. She hoped
to be cured of all her spiritual ills, but how, she hardly knew. The trip
was one they often made with horses, but Serene, going alone, took
the new railroad that ran southward into the heart of the forests and
the swamps. Her cousin Dan, with his colt and road-cart, met her at
the clearing, where a shed beside a water-tank did duty for town and
station, and drove her home. Her Aunt Mari was getting dinner, and,
after removing her hat, Serene went out to the kitchen, and sat down
on the settee. The day was stifling, and the kitchen was over-heated,
but Aunt Mari was standing over the stove frying ham with
unimpaired serenity.
“Well, and so you thought it would be cooler down here, Serene?
I’m real glad to see you, but I can’t promise much of nothin’ about
the weather. We’ve suffered as much as most down here.”
Serene saw her opportunity.
“We heard your corn was worse than it is with us. What was there
in that story, Aunt Mari, about the man who was paralyzed on a
Sunday morning?”
“Par’lyzed, child? I don’t know as I just know what you mean.”
“But he lived real near here,” persisted Serene—“two miles south
and three east of the station, they said. That would be just south of
here. And we’ve heard a good deal about it. You must know, Aunt
Mari.”
“Must be old man Burley’s sunstroke. That’s the only thing that’s
happened, and there was some talk about that. He’s a Dunkard, you
know, and they are mightily set on their church. Week ago Sunday
was their day for love-feast, and it was a hundred an’ seven in the
shade. He hadn’t been feelin’ well, and his wife she just begged him
not to go out; but he said he guessed the Lord couldn’t make any
weather too hot for him to go to church in. So he just hitched up and
started, but he got a sunstroke before he was half-way there, and
they had to turn round and bring him home again. He come to all
right, but he ain’t well yet. Some folks thinks what he said ’bout the
weather was pretty presumpshus, but I dunno. Seems if he might
use some freedom of speech with the Lord if anybody could, for he’s
been a profitable servant. A good man has some rights. I don’t hold
with gossipin’ ’bout such things, and callin’ on ’em ‘visitations’ when
they happen to better folks than me—why, Serene! what’s the
matter?” in a shrill crescendo of alarm, for the heat, the journey, and
the disappointment had been too much for the girl. Her head swam
as she grasped the gist of her aunt’s story, and perceived that upon
this simple foundation must have been built the lurid tale which had
drawn her here, and for the first time in her healthy, unemotional life
she quietly fainted away.
When she came to herself she was lying on the bed in Aunt Mari’s
spare room. The spare room was under the western eaves, and
there were feathers on the bed. Up the stairway from the kitchen
floated the pervasive odor of frying ham. A circle of anxious people,
whose presence made the stuffy room still stuffier, were eagerly
watching her. Opening her languid eyes to these material
discomforts of her situation, she closed them again. She felt very ill,
and the only thing in her mind was the conviction that had overtaken
her just as she fainted—“Then God is no nearer in Paulding than at
home.”
As the result of closing her eyes seemed to be the deluging of her
face with water until she choked, she decided to reopen them.
“Well,” said Aunt Mari, heartily, “that looks more like. How do you
feel, Serene? Wasn’t it singular that you should go off so, just when I
was tellin’ you ’bout ’Lishe Burley’s sunstroke? I declare, I was
frightened when I looked around and saw you. Your uncle would
bring you up here and put you on the bed, though I told him ’twas
cooler in the settin’-room. But he seemed to think this was the thing
to do.”
“I wish he’d take me down again,” said Serene, feebly and
ungratefully, “and” (after deliberation) “put me in the spring-house.”
“What you need is somethin’ to eat,” said Aunt Mari with decision.
“I’ll make you a cup of hot tea, and” (not heeding the gesture of
dissent) “I don’t believe that ham’s cold yet.”
Serene had come to stay a week, and a week accordingly she
stayed. The days were very long and very hot; the nights on the
feather-bed under the eaves still longer and hotter. She had very
little to say for herself, and thought still less. There is a form of
despair which amounts to coma.
“Serene’s never what you might call sprightly,” observed Aunt Mari
in confidence to Uncle Dan’el, “but this time, seems if—well, I s’pose
it’s the weather. Wonder if I’ll ever see any weather on this earth to
make me stop talkin’?” It was a relief all around when the day came
for her departure.
“I’ll do better next time, Aunt Mari,” said Serene as she stepped
aboard the train; but she did not greatly care that she had not done
well this time.
When the short journey was half over, the train made a longer stop
than usual at one of the way stations. Then, after some talking, the
passengers gradually left the car. Serene noticed these things
vaguely, but paid no attention to their meaning. Presently a friendly
brakeman approached and touched her on the shoulder.
 “Didn’t you hear ’em say, Miss, there was a freight wreck ahead,
and we can’t go on till the track is clear?”
“How long will it be?” asked Serene, slowly finding the way out of
her reverie.
“Mebbe two hours now, and mebbe longer. I’ll carry your bag into
the depot, if you like,” and he possessed himself of the shiny black
valise seamed with grayish cracks, and led the way out of the car.
The station at Arkswheel is a small and grimy structure set down
on a cinder bank. Across the street on one corner is a foundry, and
opposite that a stave-factory with a lumber-yard about it. In the
shadow of the piled-up staves, like a lily among thorns, stands a
Gothic chapel, small, but architecturally good. Serene, looking out of
the dusty window, saw it, and wondered that a church should be
planted in such a place. When, presently, although it was a week-
day, the bell began to ring, she turned to a woman sitting next to her
for an explanation.
“That’s the church Mr. Bellington built. He owns the foundry here.
They have meeting there ’most any time. ’Piscopal, it is.”
“I don’t know much about that denomination,” observed Serene,
sedately.
“My husband’s sister-in-law that I visit here goes there. She says
her minister just does take the cake. They think the world an’ all of
him.”
Serene no longer looked interested. The woman rose, and walked
about the room, examining the maps and time-tables. By and by she
came back and stopped beside Serene.
“If we’ve got to wait till nobody knows when, we might just as well
go over there and see what’s goin’ on—to the church, I mean.
Mebbe ’twould pass the time.”
Inside the little church the light was so subdued that it almost
produced the grateful effect of coolness. As they sat down behind
the small and scattered congregation, Serene felt that it was a place
to rest. The service, which she had never heard before, affected her
like music that she did not understand. The rector was a young man
with a heavily lined face. His eyes were dark and troubled, his voice
sweet and penetrating. When he began his sermon she became
suddenly aware that she was hearing some one to whom what he
discerned of spiritual truth was the overwhelmingly important thing in
life, and she listened eagerly. This was St. Bartholomew’s day, it
appeared. Serene did not remember very clearly who he was, but
she understood this preacher when, dropping his notes and leaning
over his desk, he seemed to be scrutinizing each individual face in
the audience before him to find one responsive to his words.
He was not minded, he said, to talk to them of any lesson to be
drawn from the life of St. Bartholomew, of whom so little was known
save that he lived in and suffered for the faith. The one thought that
he had to give had occurred to him in connection with that bloody
night’s work in France so long ago, of which this was the
anniversary, when thousands were put to death because of their
faith.
“Such things do not happen nowadays,” he went on. “That form of
persecution is over. Instead of it, we have seen the dawning of what
may be a darker day, when those who profess the faith of Christ
have themselves turned to persecute the faith which is in their
hearts. Faith—the word means to me that trust in God’s plans for us
which brings confidence to the soul even when we stand in horrible
fear of life, and mental peace even when we are facing that which
we cannot understand. We persecute our faith in many ingenious
ways, but perhaps those torture themselves most whose religion is
most emotional—those who are only sure that God is with them
when they feel the peace of His presence in their hearts. A great
divine said long ago that to love God thus is to love Him for the
spiritual loaves and fishes, which He does not mean always to be
our food. But for those who think that He is not with them when they
are unaware of His presence so, I have this word: When you cannot
find God in your hearts, then turn and look for Him in your lives.
When you are soul-sick, discouraged, unhappy; when you feel
neither joy nor peace, nor even the comfort of a dull satisfaction in
earth; when life is nothing to you, and you wish for death, then ask
yourself, What does God mean by this? For there is surely some
lesson for you in that pain which you must learn before you leave it.
You are not so young as to believe that you were meant for
happiness. You know that you were made for discipline. And the
discipline of life is the learning of the things God wishes us to know,
even in hardest ways. But He is in the things we must learn, and in
the ways we learn them. There is a marginal reading of the first
chapter of the revised version of the Gospel of St. John which
conveys my meaning: ‘That which hath been made was life in Him,
and the life [or, as some commentators read, and I prefer it, simply
life] was the light of men.’ That is, before Christ’s coming the light of
men was in the experience to be gained in the lives He gave them.
And it is still true. Not His life only, then, but your life and mine, which
we know to the bitter-sweet depths, and whose lessons grow clearer
and clearer before us, are to guide us. Life is the light of men. I
sometimes think that this, and this only, is rejecting Christ—to refuse
to find Him in the life He gives us.”
Serene heard no more. What else was said she did not know. She
had seized upon his words, and was applying them to her own
experiences with a fast-beating heart, to see if haply she had learned
anything by them that “God wanted her to know.” She had loved
unselfishly. Was not that something? She had learned that despair
and distrust are not the attitudes in which loss may be safely met.
She had become conscious in a blind way that the world was larger
and nearer to her than it used to be, and she was coming to feel a
sense of community in all human suffering. Were not all these good
things?
When the congregation knelt for the last prayer, Serene knelt with
them, but did not rise again. She did not respond even when her
companion touched her on the shoulder before turning to go. She
could not lift her face just then, full as it was of that strange rapture
which came of the sudden clear realization that her life was the tool
in the hands of the Infinite by which her soul was shaped. “Let me be
chastened forever,” the heart cries in such a moment, “so that I but
learn more of thy ways!”
 Some one came slowly down the aisle at last, and stopped,
hesitating, beside the pew where she still knelt. Serene looked up. It
was the rector. He saw a slender girl in unbecoming dress, whose
wild-rose face was quivering with excitement. She saw a man, not
old, whose thin features nevertheless wore the look of one who has
faced life for a long time dauntlessly—the face of a good fighter.
“Oh, sir, is it true what you said?” she demanded, breathlessly.
“It is what I live upon,” he answered, “the belief that it is true.” And
then, because he saw that she had no further need of him, he
passed on, and left her in the little church alone. When at length she
recrossed the street to the station, the train was ready, and in
another hour she was at home.
They were glad to see her at home, and they had a great deal to
tell that had happened to them in the week. They wondered a little
that she did not relate more concerning her journey, but they were
used to Serene’s silences, and her mother was satisfied with the
effect of the visit when she observed that Serene seemed to take
pleasure in everything she did, even in the washing of the supper-
dishes.
There were threatening clouds in the sky that evening, as there
had often been before that summer, but people were weary of saying
that it looked like a shower. Nevertheless, when Serene woke in the
night, not only was there vivid lightning in the sky, and the roll of
distant but approaching thunder, but there was also the unfamiliar
sound of rain blown sharply against the roof, and a delicious
coolness in the room. The long drought was broken.
She sat up in her white bed to hear the joyous sound more clearly.
It was as though the thunder said, “Lift up your heart!” And the
rapturous throbbing of the rain seemed like the gracious
downpouring of a needed shower on her own parched and thirsty
life.
 AN INSTANCE OF CHIVALRY
Applegate entered his door that night with a delightful sense of the
difference between the sharp November air without and the warmth
and brightness within, but as he stood in the little square hall taking
off his overcoat, this comfortable feeling gave way to a heart-sick
shrinking of which he was unashamed. He was a man of peace, and
through the closed door of the sitting-room came the sound of
voluble and angry speech. The voice was that of Mrs. Applegate.
Reluctantly he pushed open the door. It was a pretty quarrel as it
stood. At one end of the little room, gay with light and color, was
Julie, leaning on the mantel. She wore a crimson house-dress a trifle
low at the throat, which set off vividly her rich, dark beauty.
Undoubtedly she had beauty, and a singular, gypsy-like piquancy as
well. It did not seem to matter that the gown was slightly shabby. She
was kicking the white fur hearth-rug petulantly now and then to
punctuate her remarks.
Dora, with her book in her lap, sat in a low chair by the lamp. Dora
was a slender, self-possessed girl of fifteen, in whose cold, young
eyes her step-mother had read from the first a concentrated and
silent disapproval which was really very exasperating.
“It’s the first time that woman has set foot in this house since I’ve
been the mistress of it,” Julie was saying, angrily. “Maybe she thinks
I ain’t fine enough for her to call on. Lord! I’d like to tell her what I
think of her. It was her business to ask for me, and it was your
business to call me, whether she did or not. Maybe you think I ain’t
enough of a lady to answer Mrs. Buel Parry’s questions. I’d like to
have you remember I’m your father’s wife!”
Dora’s head dropped lower in an agony of vicarious shame. How,
her severe young mind was asking itself, could any woman bear to
give herself away to such an appalling extent? To reveal that one
had thwarted social ambitions; to admit that one might not seem a
lady—degradation could go no farther in the young girl’s eyes.
“What’s the matter, Dora?” asked Applegate, quietly, in the lull
following Julie’s last remark.
“Mrs. Parry came to the door to ask what sort of a servant Mary
Samphill had been. Mamma was in the kitchen, teaching the new girl
how to mould bread, and I answered Mrs. Parry’s questions. She did
not ask for any one.”
“I say it was Dora’s business to ask her in and call me. Whose
servant was Mary Samphill, I’d like to know. Was she Dora’s?”
Applegate crossed the room to the open fire and stretched his
chilled fingers to the flame.
“Aren’t you a little unreasonable, Julie?” he inquired, gently. “If
Mrs. Parry didn’t ask for you, I don’t quite see what Dora could do
but answer her questions.”
“Me unreasonable? I like that! Mrs. Buel Parry came to this house
to see me, but Dora was bound I shouldn’t see her. Dora thinks”—
she hesitated a moment, choking with her resentment—“she thinks I
ain’t Mrs. Parry’s kind, and she was going to be considerate and
keep us apart. Oh, yes! She thinks she knows what the upper crust
wants. If I’m not Mrs. Parry’s sort, I’d like to know why. You thought I
was your sort fast enough, John Applegate!” and Julie threw back
her dark head with a gesture that was very fine in its insolence. “I
guess if Mrs. Parry and Mrs. Otis and that set are company for you,
they’re company for me. Of course you take Dora’s side. You always
do. I can tell you one thing. When I was Frazer MacDonald’s wife I
had some things I don’t have now, for all you think you’re so fine.
MacDonald never would have stood by and seen me put upon. If
folks wasn’t civil to his wife, he knew the reason why. I might have
done better than marry you—I might——”
Julie stopped to take breath.
“Do you think I can make Mrs. Parry call on you if she doesn’t
want to, Julie?”
 She shrugged her shoulders.
“What is the good of marrying a man who can’t do anything for
you?” she demanded. “It isn’t any more than my due she should call,
and you know it. She was thick enough with your first wife. And me
to be treated so after all I’ve done for you and your children. I give
you notice I’m going to Pullman to-morrow, and I’m going to stay till I
get good and ready to come back. Maybe you’ll find out who makes
this house comfortable for you, John Applegate. Maybe you will.”
And with this Julie slipped across the room—she could not be
ungraceful even when she was most violent—and left it, shutting the
door with emphasis.
There was deep silence between Applegate and his daughter for a
little while. Why should either speak when there was really nothing to
say?
“Supper is on the table, father,” observed Dora, at last. “There is
no use in letting it get any colder,” and still in silence they went to
their meal.
Julie MacDonald, born Dessaix, was the daughter of a French
market-gardener and of a Spanish woman, the danseuse of a
travelling troupe, who, when the company was left stranded in an
Indiana town, married this thrifty admirer. The latter part of Julie’s
childhood was passed in a convent school, whence she emerged at
fifteen a rabid little Protestant with manners which the Sisters had
subdued slightly but had not been able to make gentle. She learned
the milliner’s trade, which she practised until, at twenty-two, she
married Frazer MacDonald, a gigantic, red-haired Scotch surveyor.
A few years after their marriage MacDonald went West, intending
to establish himself and then send for Julie, whom he left meanwhile
with her sister, the wife of a well-to-do mechanic living in Pullman.
His train was wrecked somewhere in Arizona and the ruins took fire.
MacDonald was reported among those victims whose bodies were
too badly burned for complete identification, and though Julie
refused to believe it at first, when the long days brought no tidings
she knew in her heart that it was true.
 She established herself at her old trade in one of the county towns
of the Indiana prairie country, where she worked and prospered for
three years before John Applegate asked her to marry him.
At the convent they had tried to teach her to worship God, but
abstractions were not in Julie’s line. Respectability was more
tangible than righteousness, and deference to the opinion of the
world an idea she could grasp. The worship of appearances came to
be Julie’s religion. Nothing could be more respectable than John
Applegate, who was a hardware dealer and one of Belleplaine’s
leading merchants, and she accepted him with an almost religious
enthusiasm.
The hardware business in a rich farming country is a good one.
And then, in her own very unreasonable way, Julie was fond of
Applegate.
“A little mouse of a man, yes,” she said to herself, “but such a
good little mouse! I’ll have my way with things. When MacDonald
was alive he had his way. Now—we’ll see.”
As for Applegate, he was just an average, unheroic, common-
place man, such stuff as the mass of people are made of. Having
decided to remarry for the sake of his children, he committed the not-
uncommon inconsistency of choosing a woman who could never be
acceptable to them and who suited himself entirely only in certain
rare and unreckoning moods which were as remote from the whole
trend of his existence as scarlet is from slate-color. But he found this
untamed daughter of the people distinctly fascinating, and, with the
easy optimism of one whose eyes are blinded by beauty, assured
himself that it would come out all right.
His little daughter kissed him dutifully and promised to try to be a
good girl when he told her he was going to bring a new mamma
home, a pretty, jolly mamma, who would be almost a play-mate for
her and Teddy, but secretly she felt a prescience that this was not
the kind of mamma she wanted.
A few weeks after his marriage her father found her one day
shaking in a passion of childhood’s bitter, ineffectual tears. With
great difficulty he succeeded in getting an explanation. It came in
whispers, tremblingly.
“Papa, she—she says bad words! And this morning Teddy said
one too. Oh, Papa”—the sobs broke out afresh—“how can he grow
up to be nice and how am I going to get to be a lady—a lady like my
own mamma—if nobody shows us how?”
Applegate dropped his head on his chest with a smothered groan.
For himself he had not minded the occasional touches of profanity—
to do her justice, they were rare—with which Julie emphasized her
speech, for they had only seemed a part of the alien, piquantly un-
English element in her which attracted him, but when Dora looked up
at him with his dead wife’s eyes he could not but acknowledge the
justice of her tragic horror of “bad words.”
“What have I done?” he asked himself as the child nestled closer,
and then, “What shall I do?” for he found himself face to face with a
future before whose problems he shrank helplessly.
One does not decide upon the merits of falcons according to the
traditions of doves, and it would be quite as unjust to judge Julie
Applegate from what came to be the standpoint of her husband and
his children. There is no doubt that she made life hideous to them,
but this result was accidental rather than intentional. There are those
to whom the unbridled speech of natures without discipline is as
much a matter of course as the sunshine and the rain. If to
Applegate and Dora it was thunder-burst and cyclone, whose was
the blame?
And if one is considering the matter of grievances, Julie certainly
had hers. Most acute of all, she had expected to acquire a certain
social prominence by her marriage, but was accorded only a
grudging toleration by the circle to which the first Mrs. Applegate had
belonged. This was the more grinding from the fact that in
Belleplaine, as in all small towns of the great Middle-West, social
distinctions are based upon personal quality and not upon position.
Then, there was Dora. From Julie’s point of view tempers were
made to lose, but Dora habitually retained hers with a dignity which,
while it endeared her to her father, only exasperated his wife. Julie
developed an inordinate jealousy of the girl, and the love of the
father and daughter became a rod to scourge them. With the most
pacific intentions in the world it was impossible to divine what would
or what would not offend Julie.
On the occasion of the family quarrel recorded, Julie departed for
Pullman, according to her threat, and for a few days thereafter life
was delightfully peaceful. Dora exhibited all sorts of housewifely
aptitudes and solicitudes, the wheels of the household machinery
moved smoothly, and the domestic amenities blossomed unchecked.
Julie had been gone a week, a week of golden Indian summer
weather, when one day, as Applegate was leaving the house after
dinner, he was met by the telegraph boy just coming in. He stopped
at the gate and tore the message open. It was from Julie’s brother-
in-law, Hopson, and condensed in its irreverent ten words a
stupefying amount of information. Applegate stared at it, unable to
understand.
“MacDonald has come alive. Claims Julie. High old times. Come.”
He crushed the yellow paper in his hands, and turning back, sat
down heavily upon the steps of the veranda, staring stupidly ahead
of him. If this were true, what did it mean to him? Out of the hundred
thoughts assailing him one only was clear and distinct. It meant that
he was free!
He turned the telegram over in his fingers, touching it with the look
of one who sees visions.
Free. His home—his pretty home—his own again, with Dora, who
grew daily more like her mother, as his little housekeeper. Free from
that tempestuous presence which repelled even while it attracted.
Free from the endless scenes, the tiresome bickerings, the futile
jealousies, the fierce reproaches and the fierce caresses, both of
which wearied him equally now. He had scarcely known how all
these things which he bore in silence had worn and weighed upon
him, but he knew at last. The measure of the relief was the measure
of the pressure also. The tears trickled weakly down his cheeks, and
he buried his face in his hands as if to hide his thankfulness even
from himself. The prospect overwhelmed him. No boy’s delight nor
man’s joy had ever been so sweet as this. When he looked up, the
pale November sunlight seemed to hold for him a promise more
alluring than that of all the May-time suns that ever shone—the
promise of a quiet life.
As he accustomed himself to this thought, there came others less
pleasant. The preeminently distasteful features of the situation
began to raise their heads and hiss at him like a coil of snakes. He
shrank nervously from the gossip and the publicity. This was a
hideous, repulsive thing to come into the lives of upright people who
had thought to order their ways according to the laws of God and
man. It was only Julie’s due to say she had intended that. But it had
come and must be met. Julie was MacDonald’s wife, not his—not
his. The only thing to be done was to accept the situation quietly. He
knew that his own compensation was ample—no price could be too
great to pay for this new joy of freedom—but he shivered a little
when he thought of Julie with her incongruous devotion to the
customary and the respectable. It would hurt Julie cruelly, but there
was no one to blame and no help for it. And MacDonald could take
her away into the far new West and make her forget this miserable
interlude. He knew that for MacDonald, who was of a different fibre
from himself, Julie’s charm had been sufficient and enduring.
Whatever might be the explanation of his long absence, Applegate
did not doubt that the charm still endured. And, in the end, even they
themselves would forget this unhappy time which was just ahead of
them, and its memory would cease to seem a shame and become a
regret, whose bitterness the passing years would lessen tenderly.
Having thus adjusted the ultimate outcome of the situation to suit
the optimism of his mood, Applegate drew out his watch and looked
at it. He had just time to make the necessary arrangements and
catch the afternoon train for Chicago.
He telegraphed to Hopson, and as he left the train that evening he
found the man awaiting him. The two shook hands awkwardly and
walked away together in silence. It was only after they had gone a
block or two that Hopson said: