The Intelligible Beauty of Creation

The divine ideas tradition offers powerful conceptual tools by which Christian theologians and mystics recognized and revered the intelligible beauty of creation, and the hidden presence of the divine in all beings. For thinkers like Origen, Augustine, Maximus, and Eckhart, the eternal Word in which God knows Godself perfectly thereby includes God’s knowing of all possible finite beings, and the intimate presence of the Word at the heart of every creature calls it towards its truest reality. This perspective reaches an apex in the symbolic understanding of the universe prominent in medieval thinkers, and the waning of this tradition (in part as a result of Nominalist thought) is explored by various narratives of disenchantment. The Trinitarian and Christological grounding of the divine ideas becomes obscured by the time of the later Renaissance, and the divine ideas are deployed within discourses such as alchemy, guaranteeing their apparent obsolescence.