3. Revelation Comes in Two Volumes: Nature and the Bible.
3. Revelation comes in two volumes: Nature and the Bible.3
Aquinas insists that all people should study nature and that our meditation on nature opens up the divine to us. “One meditates on creation in order to view and marvel at divine wisdom” (78). Citing the psalmist who sings, “I meditate on all your works, I muse on the work of your hands” (Ps 143:5), Aquinas comments: “Meditation is indispensable for well-instructed faith.” And since “all creatures confess that they are made by God,” it is our job as humans to examine creatures for the revelation of the divine that they carry within them (80–81).
If all things are “God’s works of art,” then to examine the art is to get to know the Artist. He tells us this: “Jesus teaches us to avoid anxiety by considering the birds of the sky, since there is wisdom from them. Also in Job we read, ‘Ask the cattle and they will teach you’ (Job 12:7).” All of creation is eager to reveal the divine mystery and so it follows that “there can be no question that to study creatures is to build up one’s Christian faith.” To run from science or to put science down is an affront to authentic faith because “the opinion is false of those who assert that it makes no difference to the truth of the faith what anyone holds about creatures, so long as one thinks rightly about God. For error about creatures spills over into false opinion about God, and take peoples’ minds away from God, to whom faith seeks to lead them” (75).
Thus it is little wonder that Aquinas tells us that “sacred writings are bound in two volumes—that of creation and that of the Holy Scriptures.” It is stunning, given the fundamentalism and bibliolatry of so much of what passes as Christianity today— with its own television and radio station conglomerates and well-financed marriages of religion and politics—to hear these powerful words from a brilliant thirteenth-century theologian who says bluntly: The Bible is not enough!
And never has it been. We must study nature too for a profound witness; revelation to the divine lies there as well as in written scriptures. Of course the study of nature today is different from Thomas’s day insofar as we know so much more about the cosmos.
Were Aquinas alive today, there is no question that he would be head over heels with excitement to learn the marvels that science has revealed for us. He would be beside himself with the news of the 13.8 billion years it has taken to birth our world and the size of the universe in which we find ourselves. He would, in his own words, marvel at all these marvels. Or, shall we say, “get drunk with the plenty of thy house,” as we saw in the second chapter.
It is telling, for example, that the word “Lord” for Aquinas does not mean “lord and savior.” No, “Lord” for Aquinas is a cosmic title. He says: “The word ‘Lord’ means the maker of all creation. As in Judith 16: ‘All your creation serves you.’” The word “God” for Aquinas is not about “God and us” but about all of creation. “The word ‘God’ signifies the governor and provider of all things. To believe there is a God is to believe in one whose government and providence extend to all things.” His very definition of God extends to and embraces all of creation. He never wanders far from the sacredness of creation. And, of course, the word and work of God suggest classic concepts of the logos and the Cosmic Christ. “In the beginning was the Word (logos)” (John 1:1).
We turn to creatures to learn God for good reason for “visible creatures are like a book in which we read the knowledge of God. One has every right to call God’s creatures God’s ‘words,’ for they express the divine mind just as effects manifest their cause. ‘The works of the Lord are the words of the Lord’ (Eccl 42:15).” We are to read creatures as we do books. Creatures can therefore be objects of the practice of lectio divina—and they ought to be. We contemplate them just as monks contemplate the biblical scriptures. Both are spiritual practices to awaken and strengthen the soul.
The greatness of the human person
consists in this:
that we are
capable of the universe.