5 - Spirit and Letter

Summary

Primum principium fecit mundum istum sensibilem ad declarandum se ipsum, videlicet ad hoc quod per illum tanquam per speculum et vestigium reduceretur homo in Deum artificem amandum etlaudandum. Et secundum hoc duplex est liber, unus scilicet scriptus intus, qui est aeterna Dei ars et sapientia; et alius scriptus foris, mundus scilicet sensibilis.

The first Principle created this perceptible world as a means of self-revelation so that, like a mirror of God or a divine footprint, it might lead human kind to love and praise the Creator. And so there are two books, one written within, which is God's eternal Art and Wisdom, while the other is written without, and that is the perceptible world.

St Bonaventure, Breviloquium

The presence of God within the creation, as the one whose speaking is the origin of the creation, sets the parameters for a distinctively Christian understanding of language, world and sign. This is a model which proposes a double operation of divine language. In the first place divine speech is that which institutes the world. The world, of which we are a part, must therefore be constituted as a domain of signs whereby things created point to the divine creativity as the source of their existence. This is not the scholastic principle of the likeness between cause and effect, with its origins in Aristotelian science, which formed the theoretical basis of medieval analogy, but is governed – as I shall argue – by a relation which is analogous to that which obtains between voice and text.