PETER VAN INWAGEN
And in this [vision] he [also] showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, which seemed to be lying in the palm of my hand. And it was as round as any ball. In my mind’s eye I looked at it and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came, “It is all that is made.” I wondered how it could continue to be, for I thought it was so small that it might suddenly fall into nothingness. And I was answered in my mind, “It endures, and ever shall endure, because God loves it. And so do all things partake of being: by the love of God.” In this little thing I saw a threefold nature: that God made it, that God loves it, and that God keeps it.
THE SHEWINGS OF JULIAN OF NORWICH, OR REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE, CH. 51
A great treatise on the theology of creation might be written as a commentary on these words. I am incapable of writing a great treatise on the theology of creation, but I will undertake a brief reflection on the implications of Lady Julian’s vision of the “hazelnut” for the theology of creation. I will attempt to articulate the profound insight into the relation between Creator and creatures that is presented in this brief passage.
(1) It has been remarked that stained glass is meant to be seen from inside, not from outside—a way of saying that non-Christians often do not see things pertaining to the church from the right angle to understand them. A nice illustration of this fact is provided by the contrast between Julian’s description of her vision and a remark of Richard Feynman’s (Feynman was perhaps the greatest physicist of the twentieth century after Einstein):
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.2
There are two red herrings that I must dispose of before comparing Julian’s words with Feynman’s.
The first is Feynman’s idea that Jews and Christians and Muslims3 believe that God has made the physical universe in order to have a stage on which he “can watch human beings struggle for good and evil.” This idea has no place in any theology I have ever encountered.4 It is no doubt true that most of the universe has no more to do with human beings than the waters of the tidally warmed subsurface oceans of the Jovian moon Europa have to do with beavers. No doubt a distant galaxy that is wholly devoid of life has nothing to do with us. And yet the Christian will say of it (as Julian would have said of it if she had known of such things as galaxies) that God loves it and keeps it. I think that the proper Christian attitude toward the parts of the cosmos that have no connection with or relevance to the lives and activities of human beings is well expressed in a speech by the angelic guardian of the planet Venus in C. S. Lewis’s theological fantasy Perelandra (or Voyage to Venus). Her speech is addressed to the unfallen Venerean counterparts or analogues of Adam and Eve:
Though men or angels rule them, the worlds are for themselves. The waters you have not floated on, the fruit you have not plucked, the caves into which you have not descended and the fire through which your bodies cannot pass, do not await your coming to put on perfection, though they will obey you when you come. Times without number I have circled [the sun] while you were not alive, and those times were not desert. Their own voice was in them, not merely a dreaming of the day when you should awake. They also were at the centre.
A distant lifeless galaxy is not desert (a desert is not desert), and its own voice is in it. It too is at the center. And God keeps it and loves it, although not in the same way he loves a human being or a beaver or a blade of grass. The love he has for a galaxy (or a grain of desert sand or an electron) is an ordinate love, a love of a kind appropriate to its object. As one of us can love a certain tree or a certain house or a certain landscape, so God can, and does, love every thing, every being, he has made. And he loves each of them for itself, for what it is. He loves each of the component stones of an arch for what it is and not for its relation to the keystone.
This is the first red herring: human beings are not the only actors on the stage. If the universe is a stage, it is a stage on which many, many dramas are being performed.5 The human drama occupies only one tiny corner of the stage—although the many dramas are no doubt parts of a great and harmonious whole, the drama of creation, the “Divine Comedy.” The human drama is only one of the vastly many subdramas that make up the great drama. If ours were the only play being performed on the universal stage, there might be some point in saying that the stage was too big for the drama. But this brings us to the second red herring to be disposed of.
Christians believe that the story they call salvation history, while it is indeed in one way only a tiny part the whole drama of Creation, is an extremely important tiny part of the whole:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now. (Rom 8:19–22)
Given this alleged central role played by human beings and their story within the great drama (they are the keystone), is there not after all some point to Feynman’s complaint that “the stage is too big for the drama”? The simple answer is no, for when Feynman was speaking those words, in another part of his mind he knew perfectly well that if a cosmos was to contain rational animals like ourselves, it would have to be as vast as the actual cosmos. As the physicist Stephen Barr has said (in a review of a book by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould):
Gould is overawed by . . . large numbers. The vast age and size of the universe in comparison to human scales are . . . evidence to him of human insignificance in the cosmic scheme. But [the] universe must be as old as it is for life to have had time to evolve, and as large as it is for such huge times to be possible. (General Relativity relates the size and longevity of the universe.) . . . There are basic physical reasons why living things must be small compared to the universe.6
So much for the red herrings. The most important theological misunderstanding in Feynman’s statement has to do not with the relation between the cosmos and human beings but rather with the relation between God and the cosmos—the physical universe considered as a whole, as a single object. What Feynman doesn’t see is the very thing that led Julian to say, “I thought it was so small that it might suddenly fall into nothingness.”7 In her report of her vision, Julian represents herself as seeing “all that is made” from God’s perspective—although of course her description of the cosmos as God sees it necessarily involves various kinds of license (e.g., God does not see physical things like hazelnuts by being affected by the light reflected from them). One license is this: it would have been metaphysically more accurate—and altogether useless from either a literary or a devotional point of view—if Julian had represented all that is made as having not the apparent size of a hazelnut but as having the size of a point in space, as occupying a region of zero volume, as being infinitely small. To say that the universe is, from God’s point of view, a little thing the size of a hazelnut is to do it altogether too much honor. Anything God creates—the totality of what he creates, the totality of any intrinsically possible creation—must be infinitely less than himself. And this must is the “must” of absolute unqualified necessity. To ask God to create something whose being stood to his being like the being of a hazelnut stands to your or my or Julian’s being would be to ask him to do the intrinsically impossible; it would be like asking him to make a cubical ball—or a stone so heavy he was unable to move it.8
Because he is infinitely greater than any other possible being, God is infinitely greater than the gods of classical antiquity would have been if they had existed. Zeus is an instructive example of the kind of “greatness” supposedly possessed by the pagan gods. We learn from Homer (Iliad, VIII, 19–30) that King Zeus once found it necessary to issue a warning to the other gods in case any of them should contemplate disobeying his order not to aid one or the other side in the Trojan war:
Test my power and discover it. Hang a golden chain from the sky to the earth and take hold of it, all of you, gods and goddesses together. Tug as you will, but you shall not drag Zeus the King, supreme in wisdom, to earth. But if I were to pull at it, I should draw you all up—and the earth and sea with you. And then I would fasten the chain to some pinnacle of Olympus and leave you all suspended between sky and earth. That is how much greater I am than gods and men.
Homer’s Zeus is more powerful than all the other Olympian gods combined. (Throw in the earth and sea if you like—let the other gods add the weight of the earth and the sea to their end of the chain.) His individual power and their collective power are, nevertheless, commensurable. If the other gods did earnestly engage in a celestial tug-of-war with Zeus, they would exert a force of some magnitude (some number of newtons) earthward, and Zeus would exert some force of greater magnitude heavenward. There would be some number greater than 1 (7, perhaps, or 23.16 or 42.91) that was the ratio of the heavenward force to the earthward force: Zeus stands to Poseidon and Apollo as a stronger man stands to weaker men.
And what is more, the power of Zeus and the power of Poseidon and Apollo are in a certain sense independent of one another. The Homeric gods are no more than some of the more important of the inhabitants of the world. They are inhabitants of a world that they did not bring into existence. They are inhabitants of a world that brought them into existence. Zeus began to be at a certain point in space and time owing to the causal interaction of entities whose existence preceded his. (Some mountains are older than Zeus.) Like any comic-book superhero, he has an “origin story.” The causes that brought Zeus into existence conferred a certain degree of native power on him. And the same is true of his brother Poseidon and his son Apollo, but their causes gifted them with power inferior to Zeus’s.
God, however, not only has unlimited power, but (a) his existence and his unlimited power are eternal and uncaused (as the truth of a mathematical theorem is eternal and uncaused), and (b) the existence and the limited power of any other being have been given to that being by God—and the same is true of every being there ever could be or could have been. It is senseless to speak of any being as engaged in a contest of power with God,9 as senseless as it would be to speak of a financial struggle between a son and a father if the son’s financial resources consisted entirely of an allowance voluntarily provided him by his father.
(2) Someone might reply, “That’s all very well, and no doubt it would be regarded as good theology by those who take theology seriously, but the plain fact is, we now know that the universe is vastly older and larger than anything Julian and her contemporaries could have imagined. They would have been unable to conceive of anything approaching the vast abyss of time and space that cosmology has revealed to us. No one who is aware of the real size and age of the universe—as some of us are today—can imagine even for a moment that it makes any sense to suppose that there is a perspective from which ‘this tremendous range of time and space’ would appear to be ‘a little thing, the size of a hazelnut.’ ”
I do not know how much Julian knew of what her more learned contemporaries thought about the age and the size of the cosmos, about what they called the mundus, the world. But let us consider what those learned men (I suppose they were all men) knew and thought they knew.
As to the age of the cosmos, they had no opinion. They did indeed think that the creation of humanity had taken place only a few thousand years before Christ—for they believed that God had revealed in Holy Scripture the number of human generations that had lived and died between Adam and Jesus of Nazareth. But they would have affirmed that, for all human reason and observation could discover, the universe might have existed for thousands of thousands (or, for that matter, for thousands of thousands of thousands—that is, for billions) of years, while Adam still slept in his causes. (Few if any of them thought that Genesis 1:1–25 was what we should today call a literally true narrative of the events between “Let there be light” and the creation of Adam and Eve.) The Dominicans, indeed, maintained (following Thomas Aquinas) that, although it was God’s good pleasure to create a world that had a beginning in time, if he had so chosen, he was perfectly capable of creating a world that had no beginning.
But what did they think about the size of the cosmos? That is a more important question than the question of what they thought about its age—for the suggestion we are considering is that no one who was aware of the vastness of the universe revealed to us by scientific cosmology could take seriously the idea that there was a perspective from which it could be seen as “a little thing.”
The Greeks (who were the source of what Julian’s learned contemporaries believed about astronomy) had the diameter of Earth about right, and they knew that the result of measuring the angle between two fixed stars did not vary at different latitudes or longitudes. That is to say, they knew that in comparison with the hypothetical sphere of the fixed stars,10 the stellatum, Earth could be treated as a dimensionless point.
The Greek and medieval astronomers were, of course, unable to calculate the dimensions of the stellar sphere since they could detect no stellar parallax, but that did not stop poets from speculating about its size. The South English Legendary 11 gave the stellatum a minimum radius that was (in present-day terms) a bit greater than 10 light-minutes (i.e., somewhat larger than the radius of the orbit of Earth and somewhat smaller than the radius of the orbit of Mars). How does this compare with the size of the physical universe that modern cosmology reveals to us? That question cannot be answered, for no one knows how large the physical universe is. But what is known pretty accurately is the size of the “Hubble universe,” the observable universe. The oldest light—or, to be pedantic, the oldest radiation—that reaches us was produced by an event that occurred about 378,000 years after the Big Bang. (It is coming to us from every direction, for that event filled all space.) The Big Bang occurred 13.824 billion years ago (the accepted figure at the moment at which I write), and the number 378,000 is smaller than the uncertainty in the number 13.824 billion, so we may say that the oldest light that reaches us has been traveling for 13.824 billion years and has therefore traveled 13.824 billion light-years. Now choose any direction. The matter that emitted the bit of “oldest light” now reaching us from that direction and the matter that now constitutes us and our environment have been moving apart throughout all that time, owing to the continuing expansion of space. The two clusters of matter are now about 46 billion light-years apart. We may therefore say that the observable universe has a diameter of 92 billion light-years.12
The ratio of 46 billion years to 10 minutes is a largish number—about 2.42 × 1015—but a universe with a radius of 10 light-minutes is no more imaginable by human beings than is a universe with a radius of 46 billion light-years. (If you dispute that statement, that is because you have mistaken your mastery of an algorithm for manipulating exponents for your powers of imagination.) I have put The South English Legendary’s determination of a lower bound of the distance to the fixed stars in terms of light-minutes for the purpose of comparing it with the radius of the Hubble universe. What the poem said was this: if one could travel straight up at a rate of 40 miles per day,13 one would not have reached the stellatum after 8,000 years of travel. (If one lit a celestial bonfire to signal to the inhabitants of Earth one’s completion of 8,000 years of travel on that formidable journey, its light would reach them in 10 minutes and 27 seconds.) Try to imagine a ball whose radius equals the distance that would be traversed by an immortal equestrian who traveled in a straight line at a rate of forty miles per day for 8,000 years.14 Here is an aid to your imagination: its surface area is about 625 million times the surface area of the earth.
Whether Earth is a ball about 13,000 kilometers in diameter at the center of the medieval mundus or a ball of that same size at the center15 of the present-day Hubble universe, it is a tiny island lost in unimaginable vastness. Knowing what we now know about the size of the universe is therefore no barrier—either cognitive or emotional—to supposing that there is a perspective from which that universe can be viewed as a tiny, tiny thing. At any rate, it is no more a barrier to that supposition than a belief that the universe was of “medieval” dimensions would be.
(3) Let us return to Julian’s vision. The power and the charm of her description of the vision make it difficult to take her words literally and to subject their literal sense to logical analysis, and perhaps no one ever has. I think, however, that it is instructive to do so. If one does take her words literally, one finds that they resist logical analysis. Why should the fact that a thing is very small lead someone observing that thing to “marvel that it might last”? Why should the observer have the impression that “it might suddenly fall into nothingness”? It simply makes no sense to suppose that the size of a thing has any connection with its power to continue to exist. Having a size is one of the common properties of “dwellers all in time and space.” And every spatially finite thing, everything that has a finite size, is “a little thing” compared with some other thing. (Even if there happens to be a largest thing, as the medievals believed, it is not—unless it is infinite in extent—the largest possible thing: there could be something in comparison with which it was a little thing.) Nothing is great or small but comparing makes it so. If someone were to say that a thing’s smallness was an obstacle to its continuing to exist, this statement would invite the reply, “Smallness relative to what?” If, moreover, you were to encounter a woman who was gazing at a hazelnut, and she looked up and said, “This nut is so small, I can’t see how it can continue to exist,” I suspect you would regard that as a puzzling, perhaps even an unintelligible, statement. You would do so because experience has shown you that things the size of hazelnuts do not normally find it difficult to continue to exist, and they exhibit no tendency to fall suddenly into nothingness.
Well, a vision is a vision. And a description of a vision is a description of a vision.16 If the content of Julian’s vision was, to borrow William James’s word, ineffable, then it is hardly surprising that anyone who takes her description literally and logically analyzes it finds it to be logically incoherent. Any attempt to describe an ineffable experience must be metaphorical. Metaphor is the only resource that language provides to describe the ineffable, and metaphors are notoriously resistant to logical analysis.
Suppose we take it upon ourselves to try to describe in discursive metaphysical terms what Julian describes in metaphorical terms. We might reasonably say that her metaphor is this: apparent size represents significance or importance. (If a writer wants to represent significance and insignificance in terms of a visual metaphor, what shall he or she choose to represent these things if not size?) For God, everything else is insignificant—insignificant not in itself (whatever that might mean) but in comparison with himself. And that is not because he is vain or narcissistic but simply because he is, of absolute necessity, right about everything, and everything else is and must be insignificant in comparison with him. Why all other things are insignificant in comparison with God has already been stated: First, his goodness and power and knowledge are, of absolute necessity, infinitely greater than theirs. And second, the goodness, power, and knowledge they have, they have only as a gift from him. (Milton’s Satan, who reluctantly accepts the first, tries to deny the second: “Who saw / When this [alleged] creation was? rememberest thou / Thy making . . .? / We [angels] know no time when we were not as now; / Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d / By our own quick’ning power . . . / Our puissance is our own.”17 If Milton has quoted him correctly—I have been unable to verify the quotation—the Father of Lies lies even to his closest associates, perhaps even to himself.) It is for this reason that size is associated in the vision with capacity to continue to exist: smallness represents insignificance, and in the great scheme of things, the only truly significant being is the One who alone exists of his own nature. The small things, the insignificant things—that is, all things other than God—are things that exist only because a being that has existence of itself lends existence to them. (Remember that I do not offer these words as interpretation of Julian’s words, much less as a replacement for them or an improvement on them.)
But if we are so insignificant, if we are down there in the minuscule hazelnut, why does God pay any attention to us? Why indeed does he notice us at all? Most readers of this essay will have heard at least one atheist say something along these lines: “Oh, sure, the creator of a universe billions of years old containing trillions of galaxies each of which contains billions of stars is going to take an interest in a few animals who have spent a few millennia inhabiting a planet orbiting one star. It is just as absurd as me taking interest in a single cell in my body. In fact, do the math; it’s billions of times more absurd.”18
Julian answers the question “Why does God pay attention to us?” and her answer is a simple one and not metaphorical at all. He pays attention to us because he loves us. And he loves us because he loves everything. And he loves everything because he is Love (1 John 4:8). That is not to say that God is an abstraction. The noun “love” in the sentence “God is love” does not function as it functions in “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude” or even as it functions in “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”19 God is Love as he is Goodness and Knowledge and Power: all these things are perfectly realized in him. And insofar as they are present in a rational created being, their presence in that being is a sort of imperfect (which is not to say flawed) copy of his goodness and knowledge and power. We may equally well say that God is Goodness or that God is Knowledge or that God is Power. And in a way that is difficult and perhaps impossible for us to grasp in this present life, all these “God is” statements are really the same statement. In a human being the various virtues are separable and distinguishable because a human being is composed of parts, and a human being’s knowledge and goodness (for example) are differently “seated” in his or her parts. But “there is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.”20 Human beings speaking of God speak (wrongly but inevitably) of God’s love and God’s power as two things, for love and power are two things in us human beings, and human beings are the only model of God that human beings have (and given their cognitive limitations, it’s a good model for them to have, for they are made in his image and likeness).
Nevertheless, “God is love” is—God teaches us through John—the one among the many “God is” statements that gives us human beings the best insight into his nature that we are capable of receiving. And God, being love, of necessity loves everything that he has made.21 It is not for nothing that The Shewings of Julian of Norwich is also called Revelations of Divine Love, for it is divine love that is principally shown in her visions.
If human beings and their universe are insignificant in comparison with God, if they are ontologically insignificant, what is the significance of that insignificance? The answer is “none.” Ontological insignificance is without significance for Love. Human beings are insignificant beings. But they are nevertheless beings; they are nevertheless there; they are nevertheless real. Unlike sin and death and suffering, they are substance not shadow. And Love loves all that is.
(4) In conclusion, I offer some (highly speculative) thoughts on the final statement of our selection from Julian’s description of her vision: “In this little thing I saw a threefold nature: that God made it, that God loves it, and that God keeps it.”
These words are, I believe, a description of what theologians call the economic Trinity. Although all three persons play an equal and undivided role in their relations to the created world, it is natural for human beings to “appropriate to” each triune person a certain relation to the world. The creation of the world is appropriated to the Father (the fons et origo of being),22 love of its inhabitants to the Son (who, in an appalling act of love, became the atoning sacrifice for our sins—and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world), and its providential governance to the Spirit (our parakletos and guide). In Julian’s vision, creation (“all that is made”) displays, in its very nature, the signature of its Trinitarian Creator. For I do not think that when Julian said, “In this little thing I saw three properties,” she meant by “property” exactly what we today mean by “property”—that is “feature” or “attribute” or “characteristic.” I think that her meaning was closer to what we should express by the word “nature.”23 But “in this little thing I saw three natures” does not sound right, for we think of a thing as having only one nature (unless that “thing” is Christ—but “How can someone have two natures?” is a question whose answer is beyond human understanding), and that is why I have paraphrased “In this little thing I saw three properties” as “In this little thing I saw a threefold nature.”
1. This is my paraphrase in modern English of the text of the Westminster Manuscript. Here are Julian’s actual words (with modernized spelling and punctuation): “And in this he shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand as it had seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, what may this be? And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last. For methought it might suddenly have fall to nought for littlehead. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasteth and ever shall for God loveth it. And so hath all thing its beginning by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second is that God loveth it. And the third is that God keepeth it.” The Shewings (1375).
2. A remark made in conversation. It is reported in James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 372.
3. I have to suppose that when Feynman speaks as if there were something called “religion” (and speaks of it as the kind of thing that can have a “view”), he is speaking of what is common to the Abrahamic religions.
4. It is true that Christianity, at least, teaches that human beings were created to have a central place in the economy of the universe. (“Do you not know that we are to judge angels” [1 Cor 6:3].) But a keystone has (literally) a central place in the “economy” of an arch—and yet arches are not built for the sake of giving keystones something to do.
5. This is true even if human beings are the only rational biological beings. Every bacterium is a greater drama than King Lear.
6. Stephen Barr, “Mismeasure of Man,” in The Believing Scientist: Essays on Science and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 42–45, quote on p. 44. “Mismeasure of Man” is a review of Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, and was originally published in Public Interest (Spring 1997). The title “Mismeasure of Man” is an allusion to the title of Gould’s earlier book The Mismeasure of Man.
7. Or “methought it might suddenly fall to nought for littlehead.”
8. But does not Scripture tell us that “with God all things are possible” (Matt 19:26 NIV)? Does Scripture not tell us that “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37)? It is generally agreed by Christian theologians and philosophers that there are many things that these texts, taken in context, do not imply that God is able to do: to make a cubical ball, for example, or to end his own existence, or to change the past. There is indeed one thing that Scripture explicitly tells us that God is unable to do—to break a promise he has made. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim 2:13).
9. “And war broke out in heaven” (Rev 12:7). But the war was between the angelic forces commanded by Michael and the angelic forces commanded by Satan.
10. The sphere of the fixed stars was generally supposed to be the second largest thing that God had made—the largest having been the theoretically necessary but empirically undetectable sphere called the primum mobile (the first movable) that enclosed it. Every physical or material (as we should say today) thing besides the primum mobile and the stellatum and the stars was inside the stellatum. I have to wonder whether Julian described the little thing in the palm of her hand as being “round as any ball” because the stellatum was a sphere.
11. A Middle English hagiographical poem of the late thirteenth century. (“Legendary” means “collection of stories.”) See C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 96–99.
12. Although, of course, when we look at any part of the universe that is now 46 billion light-years from us, we see it as it was 13.824 billion years ago when it was only 13.824 billion light-years away and was in a very primitive—more or less homogenous—state. The fog of radiating matter we seem to be observing at that distance has presumably by now developed into mature galaxies that are 46 billion light-years distant from us and whose light will never reach us—that is, will never reach the matter of which we are now composed—because those galaxies and that matter are moving apart at an ever-increasing speed, far greater than the speed of light.
13. I imagine that 40 miles is an estimate (rather an optimistic one) of the distance a rider on a good level road could travel on a fast horse in a day. (And the writer was really even more optimistic than that: his actual words were “forty mile and yet some del [deal] more.”)
14. Our equestrian would travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth in about 200 days. Hence, the diameter of The South English Legendary’s stellatum was, at a minimum, something like 15,000 times the diameter of Earth.
15. Earth was at the center of the mundus—at the center of the universe—because it was made primarily of stuff that could fall (it contained all the stuff that could fall), and, so the medievals supposed, there was a single, unchanging point in space, equally removed from the stellatum in every direction, to which all the stuff that could fall was trying to fall to; the geometrical center of the mundus was a special place. The Hubble universe, however, is not the universe but is simply the part of it we can observe. That we should be at the center of the part of the universe we can observe does not imply that we are in a special place—it no more implies that than the fact that the lookout in the crow’s nest of an old sailing ship is at the center of the part of the sea he can observe implies that he is at a special place in the sea.
16. I assume throughout this essay that The Shewings is not a work of fiction like The Divine Comedy. I assume that its text comprises attempts to describe experiences Julian really had. Whether these experiences were true divine revelations or simply products of her illness—she was very seriously ill and perhaps delirious when she had them—is, of course, another question.
17. Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.856–64.
18. If this argument is not quite the same as Feynman’s, it certainly belongs to the same family of arguments. And, like his argument, it contains red herrings. This universe that contains “trillions of galaxies each of which contains billions of stars,” this “tremendous range of time and space,” and the human race are equally insignificant compared with God; by that standard each person has no significance whatever. I expect that people like Feynman, people looking at the stained glass from the outside, would suppose that if there were a being who had made the universe, the Local Group and all its content would be more significant in relation to that Creator than would a grain of sand. And, of course, although a human being cannot at any given moment be individually aware of very many things, including the cells that make up his or her body, God is aware of every aspect of every being.
19. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” does not refer to God or to his love for the sun and the stars; it refers rather to the love of the most excellent part of the mundus—the primum mobile—for God.
20. Articles of Religion: Article I, in The Book of Common Prayer (London: Collins, 1968), 38.
21. To say that God loves everything he has made is not to imply that he loves sin or suffering or death, for sin and suffering and death are not things he has made. They are not things he has made because they are not things at all. Sin and suffering and death are, as Saint Augustine was perhaps the first to see clearly, defects in things. And a defect in a thing is not a smaller thing that is a part of it. The phrase “the crack in the Liberty Bell” does not denote a thing (or object or entity). When the Liberty Bell cracked, no new thing came into existence—although the bell did really then become cracked. Nevertheless, sin and death and suffering are not illusions. Saint Augustine was not Mary Baker Eddy. Sin is not a made thing, but human beings are made things, and they really do sin. Suffering is not a made thing, but human beings are made things, and they really do suffer. Death is not a made thing, but human beings are made things, and they really do die. If Buddhism says, “Suffering is real, but the self that—so the unenlightened suppose—suffers is not real,” Christianity says, “The self that suffers is real, but suffering is not real.”
22. But appropriation is only appropriation; the Nicene Creed says of the Son per quem omnia facta sunt—through (or “by”) whom all things were made. The term that is opposed to “the economic Trinity” is “the ontological Trinity”—the three Persons as they really are, as they are apart from the limitations inherent in the human experience of God that lead us to appropriate the various relations of the undivided God to the created world to one or another of the Persons. Julian’s next statement after our quoted passage is, “But what is to me sothly the maker, the keper, and the lover I canot tell”—which I would paraphrase as “But what he truly is who is to me the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, I cannot tell.” A created being, she is able to know the Triune God only through his operations in creation.
23. Consider these words from the Prayer of Humble Access: “But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.” Here, pretty clearly, “property” means “nature”: it is God’s nature always to have mercy: always to have mercy is proper to God.