2. ‘they Shall Be Drunk with the Beauty of Thy House,’ That Is, the Universe.
2. ‘They shall be drunk with the beauty of thy house,’ that is, the Universe.2
The psalmist invites us to ecstasy and inebriation on the beauty of God’s house. But Aquinas explains the origin of our spiritual intoxication with one word: the universe. Yes, the universe exists to get us drunk. The universe exists to make us joyful beyond measure. The universe does not just exist, however—it has acted for this very reason: it has brought us into existence. It invites us to inebriation. Rabbi Heschel declares that the universe “shocks us into amazement”—indeed, a radical amazement.
Aquinas proposes that being drunk means our “desires will be filled beyond all measurement of merit. For intoxication is a kind of excess, as the Song of Songs says, ‘my beloved, you are drunk with love’” (110). Love of the universe renders us drunk. The many new discoveries of the universe by science in our time has increased the occasions for such drunkenness. Ecstasy is another term for being drunk for “those who are drunk are not inside of themselves but outside of themselves” (109).
Aquinas had only a general view of evolution insofar as he insists that God did not just make creation and walk away but that creation is still going on. “God’s work whereby God brings things into being must not be taken as the work of a craftsman who makes a box and then leaves it. For God continues to give being.” (125)
Of course, Aquinas did not know what we know about evolution and the universe today. He did not know that the universe is 13.8 billion years in the making and continues to give birth and expand. He did not know that the universe possesses two trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars—so many, in fact, that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth!
No, Aquinas did not have all of today’s facts about the universe in front of him. Although, for that matter, neither did Newton or Einstein, for science is always expanding our knowledge. Nor did Aquinas have a sufficiently historic consciousness with a sense of evolution in the entire context of existence as we know it today. Consider this consciousness in light of our new creation story—the one that begins with an original pinprick of darkness that erupts into a fireball. Says Aquinas: “In the first days God created all things in their origins or causes. … Afterward, by governing the creatures, in the work of propagation, ‘God works until now’” (129).
But Aquinas did know one very important dimension to the universe that we modern and postmodern peoples have easily forgotten—namely, that the facts of our home, the universe, are only part of the story. The other part is our response to that existence—our excitement, awe, wonder, and gratitude. We have a right to get drunk on existence itself, on the realization that we, contrary to all odds, exist at all. As Heschel puts it, “the existence of the world is the most unlikely, the most unbelievable fact. … the existence of the universe is contrary to all reasonable expectations.”6 Or consider Eckhart: “Isness is God.” The isness of the universe has birthed our existence and made it possible. And existence anywhere, isness anywhere, is godly.
Knowledge is not enough. Facts are not enough. The poet Mary Oliver exclaims, “I want to be dazzled.” Being dazzled is about being drunk, inebriated, out of the box of the rational and the factual, being touched at a deep place of wonder and awe.
What is awe? This is how Rabbi Heschel, who derives from the same spiritual tradition as Jesus, talks about it. Awe “enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. … What we cannot comprehend by analysis we become aware of in awe.”7 No wonder “awe is the beginning of wisdom.” Aquinas also links awe and wisdom. “One meditates on creation in order to view and marvel at divine wisdom. … Indeed, divine wisdom first appears in the creation of things.” Both the poet and the philosopher begin with “amazement” for “wonder causes inquiry” (78, 101).
Universe means oneness. Mysticism is also about oneness or “oneing” with God, as Julian of Norwich puts it. Maybe this is why Einstein said that for him “this oneness of creation is God.”8 Both Judaism and Islam celebrate how “God is one” at the center of their prayer.
In celebrating the ecstasy we undergo vis-à-vis the universe, Aquinas is also talking about ecology. Why is that so? Thomas Berry, eco-prophet and self-styled geologian, teaches that “ecology is functional cosmology.” Furthermore, eco is the Greek word for “home”—and Aquinas states explicitly that the cosmos and creation are our home and God’s home. Are we at home in the universe? In the cosmos? Are we stepping back from our computers or our shopping trips often enough to look into our home, the universe, to study it? Or have we succumbed completely to the disastrous modern era that began with the divorce of science and spirituality, cosmos and psyche?
In calling us back to the wonder, beauty, and ecstasy of the universe, Aquinas offers us profound medicine and healing for the rupture of psyche and spirit that haunts modern men and women and opens the door to anthropocentrism, to forgetfulness and destruction of the planet, and to what Pope Francis has rightly called our narcissism as a species. We are being called back to the premodern consciousness found among indigenous peoples everywhere, but also among medieval thinkers such as Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Aquinas, who did not put humans on a pedestal but imagined us properly within the entire web of life.
In Aquinas’s language, as in today’s science, the web of life is called interconnectivity. “That all things are related to each other is evident from the fact that all are interconnected together to one end,” he observes. “The perfection of any one thing considered in isolation is an imperfection, for one thing is merely one part of the entire integrity of the universe arising from the assembling together of many singular perfections.” This is not modern individualism being preached. Community, the kinship of all beings that make up one beautiful whole, the cosmos is at stake. Moreover, “All things are connected in a common bond of friendship with all nature”—indeed, all things in the universe “seek God and desire God” with whom they share a common “friendship” (90–93).
For Aquinas, the universe is our house, our home. Who would despoil or destroy one’s own home? There is something intimate about home and our relationship to it. Intimacy is part of grandeur, it is part of our mystical lives wherein we are connected to something bigger than ourselves—not in a superficial way but deeply, in a way that gives us life and meaning and purpose. The universe does all that for us—it brought us into being along with all the other creatures that are necessary for our existence: the sun and moon, the earth and water, the plants and animals, the trees and forests, the soil and ozone. Yes, we are truly interdependent beings. That is what a human being is. And there is intimacy—in Aquinas’s words, friendship—in all of these relationships. One is reminded of the most sacred prayer of the Lakota people—“all our relations”—they are all sacred, they are all to be acknowledged and thanked and praised.
And they all render us drunk, outside of ourselves, and therefore ecstatic. Aquinas tells us that “love and also zeal are caused in us from beauty and goodness.” Objects of zeal are “intensely lovable” (114–15). Beauty is our medicine—falling in love with earth and her creatures, with the universe, our true home—there lies the medicine for waking us all up to love of life and combatting the forces within and without us that are killing the earth.
Of course to speak of “getting drunk” on God’s house or the universe is a special way of talking about what the mystics call the Via Positiva, that experience of the deep-down beauty of existence, of our planet, of being alive, of love of life in spite of all its demands and challenges. It is about generating a gratitude and reverence that emerge from awe and wonder. It is well summarized in Meister Eckhart’s simple words: “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.”
Clearly, Thomas Aquinas is in every way a mystic and champion of the Via Positiva. He invites us to be the same. And it all begins with an astonishing and ecstatic experience that we call the universe.
Revelation comes
in two volumes:
Nature
and the Bible