Bonaventure's Philosophy of Creation

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead (Romans 1:20 KJV)

                                             (Photo by Jennuine Captures on Flickr)

For Bonaventure creation is like a stained-glass window - the sense of the infinite comes from beyond the world and can be seen lighting up creation from within.

Wisdom - thoughts on the Magnificat readings Thursday 14th November

"Life is effort, firm and persevering action, and duty accepted and accomplished, the heroic conquest of the body by the soul, the serenity nothing can disturb, and eyes fixed on God. It is charity taking possession of us little by little, banishing everything that is not love."
Elisabeth Leseur

"Within Wisdom is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, sharp, irresistible, beneficent, loving to man, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying; penetrating all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits; for Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things. She is a breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; hence nothing impure can find a way into her. She is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power, image of his Goodness. Although alone, she can do all; herself unchanging, she makes all things new.
In each generation she passes into holy souls, she makes them friends of God and the prophets; for God loves only the man who lives with Wisdom....compared with light, she takes first place, for light must yield to night, but over Wisdom evil can never triumph. She deploys her strength from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things for good."
Wisdom 7:22 -8:1

"This thing is the strongest of all powers, the force of all forces, for it overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance." Tabula Smaragdina, 9

"The sun, moon and stars therefore lend their assistance to acts of divine magic aspiring to the Resurrection."
Unknown Author, Meditations on the Tarot




To co-operate with Wisdom is to allow our lives to become works of art dedicated to God. To become mindful through constant prayer and adoration of the source of our being, to thank God for everything that comes to us, is the first step in allowing our nature to be penetrated with Wisdom.

The reward is serenity nothing can disturb; the path begins with daily perseverance, the conquest of the body by the soul. The spiritual law of renunciation enables these fruits to appear. When we renounce something below, we gain something above. This is nothing more than obedience, which brings the unfallen aspect of our nature - the image of God within us - into alignment with the divine purpose.

The words of the Virgin speak to us here: 'Ecce ancilla domini fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum'. Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord, Let it be done to me according to your Word.

In the Orthodox Church this process is known as theosis - or deification. Irenaeus says: "the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through his transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself."

The quotations above from the book of Wisdom and elsewhere give some sense of how this process might occur. Wisdom, or force, as the Tabula Smaragdina would have it, overcomes all subtle things and penetrates every solid substance, quicker than any motion, pure emanation of the glory of God, reflection of eternal light, in which is nothing impure, enfolds all things and allows even the violent wrenching of things out of their own place which is the Fall to occur without allowing this discordancy to overtake the harmony of Her song. Indeed she takes up these clashing notes and makes them a part of a higher music.

In prayer and contemplation we aim to still the ceaseless disturbance of our thoughts, to become like the sea of glass around the throne of God. Contemplation is thus to participate in the imitatio christi, to crucify our will, that the Will of God may work through us. If we say this no to the lower desires which threaten to sweep us away in the currents of evolution and biological life, we say yes to a higher form of life. This participation in what Tomberg calls zoe rather than bios (both Greek words for life, but the latter having the sense of spiritual life) is to reject a Nietszchean self-assertion which sees creation as the imposing of self in a violent act and to recognise it for what it is - disobedience to the real creation narrative, which is one of harmony and peace.

There have been few greater exponents of this insight in literature than J R R Tolkien, especially in his work the Ainulindale. It is theology, myth, literature, true sub-creation in one. A creation myth of the highest order. The work of Alison Milbank (Radical Orthodoxy) and the website of Jonathan Macintosh, The Flame Imperishable, are excellent places to draw the connections between all these things.

Day by Day reading from Magnificat magazine, Sunday 3rd November

'Not only do we become by means of the sacraments contemporaries of a past that is the very source of our salvation, but we become capable of recuperating the past, of retaking and reconstructing our life by giving it a new unity. We know that there is a distance between "me" and my history, between the depths of ourselves and our acts. Our actions commit us; but once they are performed, they escape us and accumulate behind us and form the chain of our history. And this past can be crushing.

The sacraments continually permit us to transcend this history, and to judge it, and to a degree, to change its meaning and the value of the whole by means of new acts....

The sinner who has been reconciled to God in his person nevertheless drags behind him in his past a failure towards God, a failure towards love; it is true that at one moment in his history he failed the order of charity which should be reflected in every human undertaking. The event, this sin, remains a fact for ever; but by means of the sacraments it can take on another meaning in the entirety of its history, and this by means of new acts repairing the disorder; it is possible for us to restore God's honour, not only in our heart, but in the course of our history which is still being written. It is possible to change the profile of our past acts by means of new compensating acts. This is a marvellous conversion which the sacraments place within our reach! We become capable of offering to God a life really ordered by love. This is where the reflection we mentioned above concerning healing the past by means of present actions takes on its force. The sacraments do not only remove the sickness from suffering; they go infinitely farther; they transfigure and transvalue what was perversion and evil into an occasion and fruit of divine friendship.'

Father Bernard Bro, O.P.

The Gospel reading was the story of Zacchaeus today, who as everyone remembers if they ever heard the story as a child, climbed a sycamore tree to get a look at Jesus in the crowds. In the Magnificat magazine, Robert Barron quotes Thomas Merton, who said that many are in the grip of a 'promethean attitude' when it comes to morality. A belief that only a heroic stoicism will earn us divine love - if we live out certain moral commands then we will be worthy of God. He says that this is to get things backwards, as the story of Zacchaeus shows. Zacchaeus was a sinful tax collector, Jesus called to him "come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house." Then he promises to give half his possessions to the poor and pay back anyone he has wronged. So the moral reformation of Zacchaeus was preceded by the inrushing of divine grace - the encounter with Christ.

Without the encounter with Christ provided by prayer and through the sacraments, we are bereft of the opportunity for grace to touch us. And a prayerful and sacramental life gives us the opportunities we need to keep returning to the wounded place within us where we hurt, and where we keep choosing to do wrong, and facing it with clear sight and a calm heart. Jesus calls us to make a descent into an interior abyss, there to be closer to him, so that he can come and stay with us today.

As Pope Francis said: "Christian morality is not a 'never-falling-down', but an 'always-getting-up-again'.

The Rule of St. Benedict

'Benedict envisioned a balanced life of prayer and work as the ideal. Monastics would spend time in prayer so as to discover why they're working, and would spend time in work so that good order and harmony would prevail in the monastery. Benedictines should not be consumed by work, nor should they spend so much time in prayer that responsibilities are neglected. According to Benedict, all things-eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, working, and praying-should be done in moderation. In Wisdom Distilled from the Daily , Sister Joan Chittister writes that in Benedict's Rule, "All must be given its due, but only its due. There should be something of everything and not too much of anything."'

Read more here

All Things Made New: The Mary Prayer

Over on Stratford Caldecott's blog:
All Things Made New: The Mary Prayer: Today being the Memorial of the Most Holy Name of Mary, it is appropriate to reflect on the Marian prayer that complements the Jesus Praye...
This is a beautiful meditation on the Hail Mary

Quiring to the young-eyed cherubim

 "...see how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
There's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim;
Such harmony is in immortal souls!
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in we cannot hear it."

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice Act V sc 1

The question of images

Where do we go from here? Today we are experiencing not just a crisis of sacred art, but a crisis of art in general of unprecedented proportions. The crisis of art for its part is a symptom of the crisis of man's very existence. The immense growth in man's mastery of the material world has left him blind to the questions of life's meaning that transcend the material world. We might almost call it a blindness of the spirit. The questions of how we ought to live, how we can overcome death, whether existence has a purpose and what it is - to all these questions there is no longer a common answer. Positivism, formulated in the name of scientific seriousness, narrows the horizon to what is verifiable, to what can be proved by experiment; it renders the world opaque. True, it still contains mathematics, but the logos that is the presupposition of this mathematics and its applicability is no longer evident. Thus our world of images no longer surpasses the bounds of sense and appearance, and the flood of images that surrounds us really means the end of the image. If something cannot be photographed, it cannot be seen. In this situation, the art of the icon, sacred art, depending as it does on a wider kind of seeing, becomes impossible. What is more, art itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme possibilities of the sense of sight, becomes literally object-less. Art turns into experimenting with self-created worlds, empty "creativity", which no longer perceives the Creator Spiritus, the Creator Spirit. It attempts to take his place, and yet, in so doing, it manages to produce only what is arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role as creator.

From The Spirit of the Liturgy, part three, Art and Liturgy, by Joseph Ratzinger.

“The average person of our time loses the ability to see because there is too much to see!” wrote Josef Pieper in Learning How to See Again.

St. Augustine calls this desire to see without reflection on what is seen as 'concupiscence of the eyes'. Our technologies multiply the opportunities for mere luxuriation in the experience of seeing. Witness the obsession with HD, 3D, big screen hyper-real visual experience. This is one type of maximisation of visual concupiscence. Surfing the web can another, where the emphasis increasingly becomes focused on the digital device used to view diverse forms of  content, from ebooks to web browsing to streaming video. The temptation to be a 'visual magpie' and hop from one shiny new experience to another in search of a 'hit' of novelty can be powerful, and prevents any deep reflection on the thing seen. 

Obedience to the gods of new technology is almost standard amongst most of my generation. I am one of the worst offenders. As well as having a tablet I have a tablet phone, and spend most of my free time flicking through the different apps on them. I do however have some friends who are purposeful luddites, who only carry old brick phones, or none at all. I have an upgrade date approaching on my phone contract. Do I dare to reject it all? 

C S Lewis argues in the Abolition of Man that in modernity "there is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating them from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”

There is much of this also in Tolkien, inevitably. The magic of Saruman is really technology, machinery, a worldview of nature-domination, even more, a denial that things have a nature of their own, that they have an end towards which they are made, and in the void that creates there is implanted the will of the magician. This inability to see things as they are in themselves, even the denial of this possibility, which comes about in a Post-Kantian rationalist age has an antidote, which I have talked about elsewhere (in particular here ).