In medieval Europe male and female mystics experienced remarkable insights into the Cosmic Christ while Dominican and Franciscan friars, utilising theology based on Greek philosophy, continued to develop and debate ways to explain the nature of God.
Outstanding among the mystics, Hildegard of Bingen (1109–1179) developed a nature-based image of God as the “guiding image of viriditas, greenness … expressing the freshness, fertility, and fruitfulness of the life-giving power of the spirit”.747 In Leroy Huizenga’s view, “Hildegard’s vision of the cosmos and man’s [sic] place therein is integral, seeing man as microcosm of the macrocosm”.748 Hildegard was earthy and iconoclastic, prepared to
confront patriarchy by ascending the pulpit to preach against abuses within the Church. She also creatively used female images, such as menstruation and love-making, to illustrate her insights into God and nature.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), on the other hand, applying a philosophical insight derived from Aristotle, thought that God could best be understood as esse or “to be”. As Johnson notes, the existence of God is best understood as “a verb not a noun”.749 For Aquinas, God is
the source of Life both in the beginning and continuously thereafter. Santmire summarises: “God, for Aquinas, is the Living God, ‘He Who is’. And this signifies … the immanence of the divine efficacy in all his creatures, functioning at the same time as the cause of their being and their duration.”750 Aquinas comes to represent the Word as the procession of the self-
knowing or self-understanding of God, and the Spirit as the self-loving of God. In God, knowing and loving God’s-self are the continuous processions of the nature of God. This conceptualisation reveals the nature of God.
Aquinas’ argument for “participation” takes things further: “while God is in all things,” he states, “it can also be said that ‘all things are in God,’ in as much as they are ‘contained’ or embraced by a living presence which cannot be limited in any way”.751 So, just as “blueness”
747 Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 136.
748 Leroy Huizenga, “St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church,” First Things, 2012.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/10/st-hildegard-of-bingen-doctor-of-the-church (accessed June 21, 2018).
749 Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 144.
750 Santmire, The Travail of Nature, Location 1344.
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might be thought to be present in everything “blue”, and everything “blue” is an expression of “blueness”, so also “being-ness – esse” is present in everything that “is” and everything that “is” is an expression of “being-ness”. Here we find God in a delicate dance (a literal meaning of perichoresis) with the creation, but God is not contained or limited by that embrace. God’s Spirit enlivens and animates the whole creation and is bound to it. Aquinas’ argument can be connected to Johnson’s understanding of panentheism: “it [panentheism] honours the immanence or closeness of God, which is frequently overlooked in unipersonal theism which posits God solely as the transcendent cause”.752 Panentheism powerfully joins
the transcendent God to the immanent God.
According to Hunt, Augustine and Aquinas had seen the procession of the Spirit as
representing God’s self-love. Their view of the Trinity as “[t]he trinity of love that comprises the loving subject (the lover), the object of loved (the beloved), and a relation or bond of love (vinculum caritatis), the love which unites them (De Trinitate 8.14, 9.2; 15. 10)”753 is,
according to Hunt, very satisfying. The conclusion we can draw from this relationship between the Cosmic Christ and the Spirit is that the Cosmic Christ is part of the matter of the universe, the Spirit is the life or energy of this matter, and the Cosmic Christ cannot be understood separately from the Spirit of the Godhead.
Theological speculation about the nature of God was to take a leap forward under the impetus of St Francis of Assisi and St Bonaventure, who developed a theology of God in nature. Following Francis’ inspiration, Hunt concludes that “Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology also explicitly includes creation in its purview”.754 Continuing to reserve an important role for the
mind or the intellect, Bonaventure assisted the process of placing the trinitarian God in God’s world:
The creation of the world as a kind of book in which the Trinity shines forth, is represented and found as the fabricator of the universe in three modes of expression, namely, in the modes of vestige, image, and similitude … Hence, as if by step like
752 Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 147.
753 Hunt, Trinity, 23.
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levels, the human intellect is born to ascend by gradations to the supreme principle, which is God. (Bonaventure, Breviloquium 2.12)755
For the purpose of this thesis, Bonaventure’s understanding of the Word is important. Hunt observes: “Word is Bonaventure’s preferred term for the second person for it expresses the relations of the second person as exemplar both in relation to the Father and in relation to creation.”756 It appears that the second person, who Bonaventure knows as the Word, is the
same person as Irenaeus knows as Christ Jesus and is to be found in an exemplary fashion as God in creation. God as Cosmic Christ does not stand outside nor is to be found apart from creation. Margaret Pirkl observes: “Bonaventure’s teaching leads us to an almost incredible conclusion. Every leaf, cloud, fruit, animal, and person is to be seen as an outward expression of the Word of God in Love! Thus, each creature has its own identity, integrity, and dignity. Each is sacred because it holds something of the Word of God, Christ, in a unique way.”757
God as Cosmic Christ, in the Franciscan tradition, does not stand outside, nor is to be found apart from, creation.
Finally, for the purpose of this thesis, it is notable that the medieval awareness of God in nature also joins together feminine images for God and the Cosmic Christ. Complementing the attainments of the Scholastic theologians, the mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) identified God through female analogies. Johnson quotes Lady Julian: “We know that all our mothers bear us for pain and for death … But our true Mother Jesus, he alone bears us for joy and for endless life, blessed may he be.”758 She found the notion of motherhood to sit
comfortably beside the image of fatherhood of God. Jesus had used the image of a mother hen in his final lament over Jerusalem before his passion and death (Matt 23:37). Julian took the image further, perhaps in tune with the medieval devotion based on the belief that a mother pelican pierced her breast to feed her young in times of hunger, that God was like a
755 Hunt, Trinity, 28. Santmire, The Travail of Nature, location 1556–72. Santmire notes that the idea of ascent
is of major importance to Bonaventure. While acknowledging the descent of the goodness of God into Creation Bonaventure has an asymmetrical model of ascent which is available only for humans and angels. In other words, Bonaventure, while following Francis, diminishes Francis’s stress on the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity and nature.
756 Hunt, Trinity, 27.
757 Margaret Pirkl, “The Cosmic Christ,”
http://www.osfphila.org/files/file/redhillfarm/Newsletters/RHF%20Jan07.pdf (accessed July 13, 2018).
758 Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 181. Julian makes her idea of Jesus inclusively both male and female by use of the
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mother.759 Hunt says: “She links motherhood to the very nature of God but she relates it particularly closely to Christ, as the deep wisdom of God and our mother. She explains that ‘our saviour is our true mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come’.”760