Post 154. 

Medieval authors, including St. Bonaventure, engage a three-sense grammar to read the twin books of nature and scripture. The first sense, the allegorical (which I name Essence Meaning) reveals specific occurrences in nature and passages of scripture in Christ and the mysteries of faith. Unlike modern readers, when Bonaventure uses the term allegory he is not referring to mere symbolism, but to ontological—essential—participation. Essence Meaning discloses the True. 

            The second sense, the tropological (which I name Moral Meaning) relates nature and scripture to the formation of the soul—to virtue, conversion, and love. Moral Meaning discloses the Good. 

            The third sense, the anagogical (which I name Growth Meaning) draws the reader toward the future as ultimate fulfillment in God—the soul’s ascent into divine life. In hope, the Growth Meaning of nature and scripture reveals Beauty. Read together, Essence Meaning, Moral Meaning, and Growth Meaning offer a repeatable grammar that illuminates our relationships with nature and scripture, as well as logical and psychological experience. 

            To illustrate this grammar in action: awakening, beneath the severe sound of wind, I hear robins, juncos, and cardinals singing in this icy winter predawn. 

            Essence Meaning, revealing the True. I attend to the birdsong, lingering with the counterpoint and charm of what I receive gratuitously. These birds live and sing to the glory to God in their own ways—ways partially, but not wholly, graspable by my human ear. I recall the words of Jesus: “Look at the birds of the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet our heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they” (Matthew 6:26)? These birds must suffer—at least in some measure—in this cruel weather, and yet they sing. Like Christ on the Mount of Olives, vulnerable to the elements, these birds participate in Christ’s hope to enact the Father’s will, imparting their intelligence to me, an attentive eavesdropper. 

            Moral Meaning, revealing the Good. I sympathize with these birds’ discomfort and hope. Within my heart, I bear the paradox of distress and trust—that one cannot trust without first encountering distress. This virtue must be started and tested; otherwise, no opening to trust exists. Just as a fractured mirror may reveal a rainbow, the distressed being is given an opportunity to express trust amid doubt; hope rather than cynicism and anger. Jesus prays, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42)—and in harmony with Christ, these birds sing. 

            Growth Meaning, revealing the Beautiful. In a state of awe, I am astonished. Beyond our control and presumed self-reliance, there awaits an abundance of God’s care, disclosed to me in this birdsong counterpoint. The Spirit breathed life into each creature’s body at the dawn of time (Genesis 2:7) and sings into being now a compelling and brittle sound, elevating my mind toward immeasurable Beautying. This is an echo of the faultless in the limited, the timeless in the fleeting, the mighty in the fragile. All creation may partake, in diverse ways, in the eternal Word’s suffering, hope, and resurrection. 

Daniel J. Shevock 

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fran%C3%A7ois_Lombard_-_Le_Miracle_de_saint_Bonaventure.jpg 
             

Post 153. 

In The Journey of the Mind to God, written in 1259, Bonaventure reasons that the triune deity’s perfect light is imperfectly reflected in creation. The process operates in the same way that a person might be presented with an unfamiliar Mozart symphony or Georgia O’Keefe painting and infer who the artist is, considering elements such as form, texture, color and the like. By examining the natural world, our minds can ascend, as climbing a ladder, to a fundamental consciousness of God. Bonaventure suggests that created things contain vestiges of their creator, and while the creator is eternal, sovereign, and faultless, created things are temporal, contingent, and flawed. I have come to believe these flaws, like cracks in Bonaventure’s mirror, offer unexpected beauty: sunlight, upon entering a prism, diverges into the colors of a rainbow. From one, many. With this in mind, I write this poem:

            Father’s light, alight divine
            Creator, Word, and Spirit, love
            In these fissures, spectral signs
            Mirror broken, image appealing
            A beauty less-than Beauty above
            Word and living Breath and feeling
            Through these fractures, shine, shine, shine!

            In a short essay, Chance, Simone Weil writes: “The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.” This suggests that the faults in the mirror are part of the plan of creation. The Father’s creation, ex nihilo, was of existing things. Existing things are vulnerable. This vulnerability is beauty. We seem most vulnerable the cracks in the mirror of ourselves through which we attend to God’s light. Weakness, if we attend to it, can become beautiful sites of understanding.

            When we look at our world today, we cannot avoid noticing its wounds. Standing in a park, the water in this creek must be purified if I would drink it; the trees in this park have been planted in the decades since they were cleared for logging; this soil has remnants of lead, arsenic, and PCBs from the land’s coal and farming history; and my skin must be guarded from the sunshine itself using sunscreen. Yet it is this light through these leaves glowing on this soil by this water where I glimpse residues of my Creator. We aren’t afforded the opportunity to be born in the Garden of Eden, but we remember it in these faults, here.

Daniel Shevock

Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Canna_(1923)_by_Georgia_O%27Keeffe.png