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Introducing an Introduction to Christian Natural Theology

This volume attempts two tasks, each one difficult in our own day. First, it ventures into the realm of natural theology, providing in brief span a view of how the world displays the life of God. Second, this first task is pursued, not discursively, but through a range of poems ordered according to the Apostles’ Creed. While each task, on its own terms, is hardly a popular exercise in today’s Christian culture, taken together, they strain habitual expectation. The following discussion seeks to explain this challenge in its historical context. In the end, I believe there is a strong argument to be made that poetry is a necessary aspect of the Christian faith, in large part because the created world itself is the positive instrument of the Christian faith’s practice. The two—poetry and world—go together, and Christian faith itself cannot do, indeed does not exist, without them.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and militant atheist Steven Weinberg has expressed a certain regret that the demise of Christian religious belief deprives us perhaps of a significant source of literary inspiration, once evident and forceful in the past at any rate. Where Christian faith has helped positively shape good poetry today, he argues, it is generally in the force of its rejection by the author (e.g., someone like Philip Larkin). But the “wonder” that Weinberg still believes it is possible and good to feel in the face of the natural world, as well as the fear at the annihilation of a bare death that is, in fact, all we have to look forward to, with whatever “good humor” we can muster, is not the last word on faith’s cultural dissolution in the West especially. Indeed, it represents itself one aspect that a robust Christian natural theology must itself embrace, as a reflection upon and within the world around us actually discloses the Lord from whom and with whom and towards whom we live, even in the drift of that current that has caught up the “honorable” facing into nothingness that apologists for unbelief like Weinberg have assumed. For even what is nothing takes its shadowed form from something beyond its seeming or perhaps all-too-real emptiness.1

It is important that the Christian faith itself struggle with the character of this transitory emptiness, and allow it to speak into the assertions of religious confession and thereby mark out more clearly that confession’s contours. This is what a robust natural theology can do, and it is what poetry most especially is bound up in doing.

The Historical Shape of Natural Theology

God is apprehended within the world around us, in which we live. But how can this be so? On this question hangs much of our contemporary culture’s religious unease.

Taken in its modern sense, “natural theology” is the study of God based on truths that do not derive directly either from Scriptural revelation or authoritative (and inspired) ecclesial discernment. These “natural” truths can include a range of realities, from the physical world to the world of human artifacts and individual or cultural experience. “Natural,” in other words, need not refer to non-human or pre-social reality as opposed to human community. But in encompassing the latter, the natural does so without direct reference to or derivation from the Creator towards whom the creature stands, as across an infinite qualitative divide.

And taken in this modern sense, the category of “natural theology” has been a problematic one. But it was not always so, in large measure because this modern sense of “natural theology” has not always exhausted the meaning of the phrase.2 Borrowing perhaps from the first century BCE Roman writer Varro, it was Augustine who enshrined the topic of theologia naturalis as a Christian scholarly focus, referring it to the nature of the gods, and, in its true Christian form, to the “divine nature” itself in its true substance. Hence, natural theology did not necessarily exclude, from the start, the presupposition of the Christian God. Rather, its orientation as “natural” marked it as having to do with just such presuppositional categories of even thinking or conceptualizing the Christian God, expecially in relation to other sub- or anti-Christian beliefs. Natural theology, that is, was primarily metaphysical in interest, rather than exegetical or doctrinal in the first instance. But if metaphysics might be involved, it would be a metaphysics grounded in, rather than opposed to, divine revelation as a clear coordinate for understanding the “nature” of what is real, with God as the defining center. So Augustine in The City of God engages theologia naturalis with a free-wheeling investigation into God’s standing toward other divine beings, and their relation to the world and to causation, including even angels in his discussion.3

Natural theology, once pursued in this way, was bound to be unclear in its extent and its boundaries. The Stoic near-identification of “nature” with the divine itself, and the equation of Reason or Logos with the active element of the world as God, provided conceptual handles for some later Christian philosophical metaphysics. Some of these identifications and associations simply crept into the late antique and early medieval discussions and cataloguing of observation and began to offer a storehouse of imagery by which the natural world began to be understood in Christian terms, whatever the blurring of distinctions this might have implied. And so we see works like Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century De Natura Rerum already opening the way for a metaphysical linkage between matter and God, at least as a means of understanding the world on its own terms as bound to some kind of Christian worldview.

Over the course of the next centuries, we can find among the philosophers and theologians a variety of ways in which an increased overlapping of categories between the realm of material metaphysics and scriptural description leads to the enveloping notions of a “world soul” and a Natura that describes this in a way that—again using Stoic terminology of the antique world—draws in the person of God as Spirit.4 By now, Plato’s Timaeus has taken on a central role in this conceptualization, as in Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia from the mid-twelfth century.5 The historical place of movements like Franciscan “inductive” spirituality (cf. Bonaventure’s Platonically informed The Mind’s Journey into God), that sought to move the contemplative mind from a consideration of God’s creatures to their Creator, seems to be related, if unclearly, to these developments. The “books” of Nature and of Scripture had by now, in any case, been seen to rest concordant (if not synonymous) one with another, a conviction well established into the seventeenth century, as Drummond’s famous sonnet lays out, “Of this fair volume which we World do name. . . .”

The blurring of philosophical and theological categories over this period, however, should not be seen in itself as a corruption of Christian realism. For even in its appropriation of non-Christian conceptions, the purpose of these discussions was always to elucidate something that Scripture itself was seen as centrally affirming: “ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made,” in Paul’s words (Rom 1:20). How can the world not witness to, even “reveal” God? And more so, how might we deny this in a specifically Christian sense, when the Apostle also tells us that “in him [Christ, the Son] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). If nothing else, the “visible world” of “secondary causes,” as Gregory of Nazianzus eloquently urged, was so marvelously fraught with mystery that at the least it unveiled the greater veil of God’s marvelous being, which only the revelation of Christ could indicate directly.6 In general, then, “natural theology” necessarily remained bound, for all its occasional odd stirrings and departures, to a scriptural ontology, much as Augustine himself seemed to presuppose.

A more noticeable decoupling between nature and Scripture, theologically speaking, begins in the sixteenth century and achieves completion in the seventeenth, at least according to compelling scholarly arguments such as those by Michael Buckley. Much of the impetus for this comes from a new questioning of religious tradition itself, including the Scriptures, growing out of an array of building forces from Renaissance and Reformation habits and dislocations. With a developing science of the observable world moving forward, both in terms of biology and physics, as well as in the documentary sciences of critical history, the “natural” came to have its own integral place apart from scriptural metaphysical conceptualities—including revelation—in which it had always previously found its home.

In particular, natural theology became more and more tied to the question of theistic “proof,” and the character of human knowledge’s foundations. Although the notion and formulation of “proofs of God” were already engaged in the Middle Ages, often on the basis of categories and conceptions derived from Augustinian exemplars (something that continued in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), they did not achieve a special status as apologetic disciplines in their own right. But by the seventeenth century it was just such independence of apprehension that began to be clamored after, in the face of growing public disputes over the rational and persuasive bases of conflicting ecclesial and religious claims. Whether moving from deductive premises, or ordering thought from inductively arranged data, the form and nature of God would be presented, so it was thought, in an almost necessary manner.

Summarizing the work of a Christian apologist and scholar like Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), who re-deployed Stoic “topics” in a new battle against Europe’s emerging class of religious skeptics, Buckley writes:

Natural theology, then, becomes no longer a part of metaphysics, but derivative by common sense of ordinary philosophic maxims from astronomy, comparative religion, mechanics, and biology. It is a world to which theology itself has very little contribution to make. So it remains in the centuries to come, an effort to provide a preamble to Christian convictions about god which does not include Christ.7

Only a few writers at the time accepted Spinoza’s neo-Stoic identification of this realm with God himself—deus sive natura8—an identification by which the divine was actually drawn away from revelation and church into a more exclusive natural orbit than “theology” formally understood. But even stopping short of such a move, natural theology came to be seen increasingly as an alternative and even rival to Christian scriptural and ecclesial doctrina, with its own subject matter, rules, and arguments.

The subversion of sacra doctrina was not, by and large, the intention of most Christian natural theologians in the early modern world. From Robert Boyle through John Ray (not to mention the more lugubrious Thomas Burnet), Bernard Nieuwentyt, J. C. Lesser, and finally the most successful (and currently intellectually vilified) exemplar of orthodox natural theology, William Paley, the study of natural phenomena was viewed as a buttress to the Christian faith against rationalistic and even skeptical atheism.9 It was also viewed, however and in its own right, as a means of devotion and joyful worship of God. And certainly for moral theologians like Joseph Butler (and Paley, in his own way) natural theology provided a wondrous opening by which the shape of the Christian life might be seen as coherent with the general shape of the world (although not without pain for all that).10

David Hume, to be sure, attempted to deal a death-blow to these kinds of hopes. In his Dialogues on Natural Religion, as well as in his Natural History of Religion from the mid-eighteenth century, he sought both to subvert the logic of drawing metaphysical (and religious) conclusions from observed phenomena and to offer an ersatz “historical” explanation for the (perhaps inescapable) rise of religious belief. Kant, for his part, tried to make a virtue of Hume’s skepticism in these regards, canonizing the rational limitations of the religious imagination as a kind of human distillate to be gratefully but responsibly used in translated human form. These kinds of arguments had a cumulative effect, especially as the religious imagination, as Kant would conceive it, was itself the object of increasing disdain and suspicion from many quarters of institutionally aggrieved Europeans. It was never clear, in any case, what to do with the religious leftovers of these debates, and philosophical theism has never found a social niche beyond dark corners of the academy.

Ultimately, with the elaboration of the natural sciences as well as the establishment of anti-ecclesial rationalism within European educated society, the distinction between the objects of natural theology and scriptural metaphysics grew into an actual rupture. Despite the efforts of natural theologians as wildly disparate as Coleridge and Philip Henry Gosse—both of whom, in their own ways (along with many others in the nineteenth century still) were caught up in the astonishing combustion brought about by the Bible and the Church’s encounter with naturalistic description—the rupture proved in fact to be a widening chasm. It was one that perhaps encouraged and certainly was used to promote broad and specific intellectual movements seeking to overthrow altogether the adequacy of traditional theology’s claims. In the place of such claims, many “natural theologians” sought to provide newly constructed descriptions of God that could be asserted as coherent with developing scientific understandings of the world, sometimes directly addressing Hume and Kant, sometimes simply plowing ahead as if they had never raised their questions. “Natural theology” came to have for its practitioners a greater stature, in terms of truth, than doctrinally oriented theologies set forth within the Church’s seminaries. An established churchman like Charles Raven in the twentieth century could certainly maintain his place within the classical structures of the Church; but his work led him to question in many ways the classic tenets of the Church he served.

Roman Catholics tended to eschew the conflict, by and large. Still, the last century has seen a growing unanimity among traditional Christians, classically enunciated by Karl Barth, that “natural theology” in its modern sense—and perhaps in all senses—is both useless and probably even corrupting of the Church’s understanding of God.11 From Barth’s perspective, natural theology fails fundamentally because it cannot, by definition, “observe” the world as it “really is,” both in its relationship with God in Christ and in its rebellion against that relationship. Any attempt to describe the world, and from that description to illuminate God, apart from or prior to the truth of God’s being in Christ, is a priori a deceptive task that gives rise to a deceiving fruit.

Not everyone who has objected to natural theology in our day on these grounds—not even, perhaps Barth himself, ultimately—would necessarily wish to undercut the possibility of knowing God through the world that God has made. But the construal of that world’s theologically descriptive capacity has been profoundly altered by the suspicion now almost universally cast upon natural theology’s modern argument with sacra doctrina. Stanley Hauerwas, while building on Barth’s classic articulation of that suspicion, has for instance, sought some kind of descriptively based theological indicator within the phenomenologically rooted “witness” of Christian service in the world. Such witness, he claims, through its very coherence with God’s will in Christ, attests to the “way things really are.” This is a kind of adjustment towards that which he has earlier precluded, as Hauerwas himself admits when he speaks, following Barth, of a “recovery of natural theology as a Christological theme.”12 But it may go further even than he realizes. For if Hauerwas is right, and proper Christian witness provides a rational response to, and language to talk about, God’s self-revelation, then it becomes possible to recover the value of much of the human-centered discussion that provided the modernist project that seemed to render purposefully inadequate the world’s indication of God: will not the Christian life, in its depth of integrity, finally permit coherence to emerge, however odd such coherence might seem to those whose eyes are still not used to the light?

The issue here has to do with the contours of the perceived world—both its own outlines, as it were (assuming they exist in and of themselves somehow), and the powers of perception belonging to those who apprehend it. Just as pertinently, then, there has been, in the wake of Barth’s writing in particular, a desire to grapple with the very character of creation in its intrinsic and intrinsically ordered relationship to God, just because of the Christian claim that any truly “natural theology,” in its original sense, must be bound up with the metaphysics of God’s own self-revealing. In other words, the “rupture” between nature and revelation that seems to have overwhelmed natural theology in the modern era is perhaps itself wrongheaded and in need of reconceiving.

Analogy as Imitation

Natural theology has had its own recent resurgence in some circles of religious philosophy. The apologetic motive, frankly, is still very much at one with the seventeenth century’s, although the field has changed dramatically in the combat, with Christian belief clearly requiring (and having expected of it within the academy) a set of less-assertive claims. And so the claims of atheism are now met, not by offering “proof” as much as by saying that such a demand and response is in fact inappropriate and unnecessary. On offer instead are the alternatives of a kind of rational probabilism. These are given in theistic terms or even as aspects of particular Christian beliefs, or of a certain presuppositional logic of individual and communal faith that need not so much rely on “proof” or “evidence” as on a certain coherent reasonableness that has its place within the pluralistic realm of rational human life as a whole. By and large, contemporary natural theologians tend to side-step basic questions of induction and deduction, and so avoid the attacks of a Humean kind or the skepticism of the anti-Kantians. But in so doing, they have still left open the possibility of a weaker kind of “induction,” more akin to a devotional practice, whereby the things of this world can contribute and play a part in one’s deepening apprehension of God, without however needing to play an essential or foundational role.13 Even here, though, questions arise and thrust us back to earlier arguments and worries.

One of the more contentious areas of natural theology among Christian theologians in the last fifty years has centered on the question of “analogy,” and in particular whether there is and how we are to understand any analogy of creation’s reality with its Creator, that is, with God. It should be said that the very notion of an analogy of creation is rooted in a Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) metaphysic. Even to discuss it as a possible way of understanding the nature of the world—or “nature” itself—is, for many, to locate natural theology in a pre-modern framework. Barth’s early rejection of such talk of analogy (particularly the form used, he thought, by Roman Catholic theologians), and his continuing reluctance to use it himself in any form, has proven a major point of debate. How can the creature, in its intrinsic rebellion against God, in its infinite qualitative distance from God, and in its exclusively defined character in relation to the pure graciousness of God in Christ, ever be an indicator, apart from the latter, of God in terms that could be truthful?

But the very notion of an “analogy”—of metaphysical “being” or of form or of reality—between creature and Creator orients the discussion in a way that Barth was perhaps not as sensitive to and even as appreciative of as he ought to have been. Creature and Creator demand, in their very utterance and use as words and concepts, the application of presuppositions, at least, that assert fundamental relationships that are described only on the basis of “revelation.” Indeed, the words cannot be deployed even apart from some kind of grammar, even narrative grammar, that must appropriate particular claims, in the Christian case, of Scripture. Why then the worry over their secularly imported status?

And so Thomas Aquinas, who represents a classic (if diversely interpreted) exponent of the notion of analogy in this case, speaks of the relationship in terms given to him by the Scriptures themselves: “wisdom,” for instance. And this is the question: how shall we understand the use the Scripture itself makes of a term like “wise” as applied both to creature (for which we have some habitual conception) and Creator, whose “wisdom” must indeed seem incongruous in every way with the word’s cultural usage? Whatever similarities exist between human and divine “wisdom,” Thomas writes, it cannot be a similarity of identity that is being expressed linguistically: “it should be said that the Creator and the creature are reduced to one, not by community of univocation but by community of analogy.” There are different kinds of analogy, Thomas goes on to explain. For instance, some things are “analogous” because they are both aspects, in different ways, of one reality (e.g., act and potency are both aspects of “being” and are thus analogous). But in the case of those aspects of God that we speak of in natural terms, the “analogy” has to do, he says, with the fact that one thing has caused the other: “one thing receives existence and meaning from the other, and such is the analogy of creature to the Creator: the creature does not have existence except to the extent that it has come down from the first being.” Thomas calls this kind of analogy “imitation,” a similarity between the thing caused and the Cause itself: “Hence the creature is not called a being except insofar as it imitated the first being; and it is the same concerning wisdom and all the other things that are said of the creature.”14

The notion that there is some resemblance between the thing caused and its cause is, in itself, not entirely clear. But it derives—and even Thomas’s language of “descent” does this literally—from scriptural claims, like that of Jas 1:17: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” This notion, furthermore, has formed the basis even of developing modern Christian natural theology that, finally, Barth himself came to distrust so deeply. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodist commentator Adam Clarke provides an effusive catalogue, precisely of natural theology’s practitioners and their labors, on the basis of the “descending” analogy. While discussing, on Exodus 28, the fashioning of the priestly vestments for the Tabernacle’s service, Clarke follows a traditional exegetical move (dating even from pre-Christian Jewish commentary and taken up by the fathers) on this text by seeing the detailed ornament of the garments as depicting somehow—analogously—the beauteous wonder of creation, now also (analogously) represented through the creative artistry of the human craftsman:

This principle, that God is the author of all arts and sciences, is too little regarded: Every good gift, and every perfect gift, says St. James, comes from above, from the Father of Lights. Why has God constructed every part of nature with such a profusion of economy and skill, if he intended this skill should never be discovered by man, or that man should not attempt to examine his works in order to find them out? From the works of Creation what proofs, astonishing and overwhelming proofs, both to believers and infidels, have been drawn both of the nature, being, attributes, and providence of God! What demonstrations of all these have the Archbishop of Cambray, Dr. Neuwentyt, Dr. Derham, and Mr. Charles Bonnet, given in their philosophical works! And who gave those men this wisdom? God, from whom alone Mind, and all its attributes, proceed. While we see Count de Buffon and Swammerdam examining and tracing out all the curious relations, connections, and laws of the Animal kingdom; Tournefort, Ray, and Linne, those of the Vegetable; Theophrastus, Werner, Klaproth, Cronstedt, Morveau, Reamur, Kirwan, and a host of philosophical chemists, Boerhaave, Boyle, Stahl, Priestley, Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Black, and Davy, those of the Mineral; the discoveries they have made, the latent and important properties of vegetables and minerals which they have developed, the powerful machines which, through their discoveries, have been constructed, by the operations of which the human slave is restored to his own place in society, the brute saved from his destructive toil in our manufactories, and inanimate, unfeeling Nature caused to perform the work of all these better, more expeditiously, and to much more profit; shall we not say that the hand of God is in all this? [. . .] He alone girded those eminent men, though many of them knew him not; he inspired them with wisdom and understanding; by his all- pervading and all-informing spirit he opened to them the entrance of the paths of the depths of science, guided them in their researches, opened to them successively more and more of his astonishing treasures, crowned their persevering industry with his blessing and made them his ministers for good to mankind. The antiquary and the medalist are also his agents; their discernment and penetration come from him alone. By them, how many dark ages of the world have been brought to light; how many names of men and places, how many customs and arts, that were lost, restored! And by their means a few busts, images, stones, bricks, coins, rings, and culinary utensils, the remaining wrecks of long-past numerous centuries have supplied the place of written documents, and cast a profusion of light on the history of man, and the history of providence. And let me add, that the providence which preserved these materials, and raised up men to decipher and explain them, is itself gloriously illustrated by them.

Of all those men (and the noble list might be greatly swelled) we may say the same that Moses said of Bezaleel and Aholiab: “God hath filled them with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge; and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works; to work in gold and in silver, and in brass, in cutting of stones, carving of timber, and in all manner of workmanship;” chap. xxxi. 3–6. “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein;” Psa. cxi. 2.15

The work of imitation is here described in terms of “inspiration,” something that perhaps is less obvious in Thomas’s more general discussion. But it is an inspiration that works more deeply than simply in the efforts and accomplishments of singularly chosen individuals. For, as eighteenth-century writers like Robert Lowth began to recognize,16 it is the same Spirit who leads individual poets who also creates each element of the world that the poet praises, and finally is the Author of Scripture’s words themselves. (Or, indeed, one could speak—as does Maximus the Confessor—of the creative Word whose “words” not only directly take form in the Scriptures, but found the ability of human beings to speak their own words at all.) Indeed, the analogy is “latent” in creation itself, and its imitative character is itself a part of the inspiring work of God, whose description and articulation are given particular form by artists, but hardly invented by them. Indeed, the artist shares with his work the common Cause that draws them together, so that speech or crafted expression become bound up inextricably with the very nature of their created analogy. What is “imitative” is this history of createdness from the one God; and this history necessarily repeats in different ways and according to different aspects the singular and inescapable relation that is God’s initiating formation of all things.

Analogy as Shadow

There is clearly a problem, however, with conceiving of natural theology as the articulation of that imitative analogy of creature to Creator that obtains in a broad and exhaustive way with respect to the natural world. In the first place, there is the simple challenge of accurately describing the form of the analogy itself, so as not to distort its divine implications, and thereby its moral conclusions from a human point of view. If human wisdom is analogous to God’s own wisdom, as object to its cause, we must nonetheless first be able to describe the shape of human wisdom itself if the claim is to have even a devotional focus of accuracy.

To those (like Hobbes,17 not to mention even Solomon, as in Prov 6:6) who saw, for instance, among the ants a moral analogy for human life (however imperfect), legitimated if even only implicitly by its divine origin, scientists like Julian Huxley declared that all such analogizing was entirely perverted: “Innumerable comparisons have been made between human society and the social organisation of ant, bee, or termite . . . [and] almost without exception the moral has been false.”18 So the geologist and poet Jonathan Wonham has argued as well: what exactly we find analogous seems to reflect less the First Cause than the simple cultural prejudices of the observer. In Caryl Haskins’s 1939 Of Ants and Men,19 Wonham argues by example, Haskins

compares the evolution of three major ant groups: the Ponerines, the Myrmicines and the Formicines to “evolution” of human society from primitives, to empire-builders and, finally, to pioneers. Of Ponerines he says: “The young are, for ants, extremely athletic, competent, and able to care for themselves, exactly as the children of primitive peoples display an early competence which belies their later deficiency.” Or: “the ease with which the entire economy of the colony may be overturned by a very slight alteration of the environment all bespeak primitiveness.” So much for Ponerines who are, eventually, dismissed as carnivorous, barbaric and always on the move looking for new prey on which to feast. The Myrmicines, with their “Queen found[ing] colonies among inhospitable regions’ sound like agents of the British Empire. And the Formicine resemble, more than anything, the doughty American homesteaders of the frontier, ‘pushing’ hard upon the edges of the (American continent’s) melting glaciers . . . an aggressive, sensitive band of pioneer Formicines” whose “simplicity in social life is evident” and who rely on their own resourcefulness.20

Who is to say, in retrospect, if Haskins’s ants did not indeed unlock, through analogy, the meaning of humankind in 1939?

Still, 1939’s organic resemblances are a far cry from God’s own hand tilting the world. Those who speak of the ants at best describe themselves, and perhaps that only uniquely and mischievously. If we “go to the ant” (Prov 6:6) and “ask the beasts” (Job 12:7), shall we hear “wisdom” or more likely, the corruption of wisdom? So what shall we say of imitative analogy, other than at best that it is a hope whose gift is rendered vain by the reality of the malleable human heart and perhaps even (as Burnet wondered) the figural vacuity of all living things, such that the “beast” is left only to point out sin, a usage the Desert Fathers eagerly employed?

But in fact, among those most wedded to the scholastic doctrine of analogy are those most aware of its moral limitations. God is “transcendent” to all “transcendents” as we might imagine them, Henri Bouillard writes. Even “being,” as in the proposition that “God is,” cannot be understood as a predicate, so as to introduce into God’s reality a category that is simply common to all things, including ourselves. And so the early twentieth-century Thomist Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges turns to Aquinas’s citation from Gregory the Great: balbutiendo ut possumus excelsa Dei resonamus (“Even in our stammering, we are able to sound out the marvelous things of God”).21 This is a matter of grace, to be sure, but a grace, grasped negatively if looked at squarely, embedded in the forms of our creaturely existence. Even the term “perfection” is not adequate for the Uncreated who alone creates. To use such defining words as “cause,” writes Sertillanges, therefore “implies no more than the postulate of universal poverty.”22

By speaking of “poverty” Sertillanges turns to the general category of creaturely limitation, as though there are outlines that bind the creature’s sense and experience, and beyond which its pressing cannot move even though that press itself is somehow driven towards God. Impossibilities hound the very being of the creature. Even Barth saw mortality as a king of natural “historical witness” to God, although hardly of the same kind as Revelation.23 And hence Sertillanges is talking about more than an experiential limit upon knowledge. He is alluding as well to the moral failure involved in a “poverty” whose reach is exhaustive, so that the “outlines” of a creature and its experience represent also the shape of one’s interior perceptions and reactions. Thus, all creatures come into confrontation with their “outlines.” But these outlines are also “inlines,” in the sense that they define every aspect of creatureliness as also a kind of inevitable withering: for who are we, if we cannot know even who we “really” are? Are we not destined simply to drift away? Do we not “pass as a shadow,” therefore, neither knowing our coming nor our going (Eccl 6:12)?

Perhaps this kind of judgment is already too interpretively shaped within a Christian mode of thinking. But that is the nature of Christian natural metaphysics. Indeed, the claim here regarding the analogical character of human experience and apprehension—of the “world” as it is bound to human life somehow—is that it speaks of God, even when and especially and fundamentally only (because this only is what can happen) when somehow one has failed to speak rightly of God at all. This too marks the outline, not of God but of what God has made. Yet having made it, it is His, and will ever be such. We might speak of analogy here in terms of a “shadow” with its ambivalent character of outline from without but also darkness and threat as it somehow obscures some limited and perhaps even false hope from within. Indeed, the scriptural language of “shadow” as pertaining to God is itself somewhat ambiguous: protective (Ps 17:8; 91:1), overcoming and even deathly (Isa 25:5; Jer 6:4; 13:16), creatively instrumental at a distance (Acts 5:15), looming out in awesome and revelatory glory (Matt 17:5), incomplete (Jonah 4:5-8), even somehow inappropriate (Jas 1:17). But for all that, “heavenly” shadows form the connective tissue of natural history and divine reality (Col 2:17; Heb 8:5; 10:1), and the world exists just in this form, marked by the overcast of goodness and heaven. Much as the Law is “holy, just and good,” is in fact “spiritual,” yet it drives us to our knees in a recognition of “wretchedness” before God who alone can turn this—yet just this!—into “thanksgiving” (Rom 7:12, 14, 24, 25), so our “natural” lives drive us to God as they drive us against our own perplexed inner and outer walls.

Obviously, the sense that God casts a shadow upon the world, indeed, that the world is filled with or even somehow stands towards God as a set of shadows derived from some further and ungrasped substantial form, scriptural though the metaphor is, was prone to a range of more strictly philosophical and Platonic elaborations. But the metaphor remains implanted all the same, and works on at least two levels: precisely by grasping the material aspect of creation and claiming this analogically to its Creator and Cause; yet also by insisting that its character as a “natural” life be imbued with a fundamental ambivalence and ambiguity, so that its turn toward God even proves to be the source of diverse and perhaps distorted claims. In our imitation of God, that is, we are knotted, at least in ourselves, to the moral ambiguities and even abject failures of the shadow’s passing.