William of Saint Thierry VI: Faith and Heresy

Extract

In an age when people ask whether God is better visualised as ‘up there’ or ‘in here’, it could be relevant to recall the medieval and Augustinian approach, which claimed that the best way to think of God was necessarily as that on which the intellectual structure of man is modelled – mens, notitia, amor or even memoria, intellectus, voluntas. In other words, the Trinity. For if a Christian holds in the first place that man is made in the image and likeness of his creator, then one can speculate about the original on the basis of the copy. ‘For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.’

The traditional formula still had validity in the period of William of Saint Thierry because man was even then conceived as being sympathetically in accord with the universe around him, and with God. A divine quaternity related him to the four elements, the four humours, and so on, and divine trinity, in the same way, related him to the nature and the persons of God. It was apparently not difficult for twelfth century people to see themselves as part of the landscape, in an almost Chinese sense, nor was it difficult for them to see themselves as involved in the matter of God, ‘as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin’.

We have already considered William’s treatment of the vindication, as he calls it, of the three faculties of man by the three persons of the Trinity, memory, reason and will, each being taken as his own by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively.