Seeing the Beauty of the Lord: Mystics on Nature as Theophany
By Bernard Mcginn, Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Originally published in Religions.
Many [Christian] mystics, due to their concentration on God present in the center of the soul, have been thought of as “world-deniers,” people who turn away from everything external, especially corporeal beauty, lest it distract them from their goal of uniting with the Supreme and indescribable divine Beauty. To be sure, there are many passages in the mystics that at first glance seem to support this view. But that is not the whole story—nor even half the story. Even mystics who seem to offer little direct reflection on seeing God in creation may offer insights into how opening one’s eyes to the world is also to open the eyes to God. The second question asks what kind of seeing is involved. How do we see God when we behold the world and its beauty? We can, of course, think of this as a form of what has been called “nature mysticism.” The term is often employed, but I confess to finding it ambiguous, at least with regard to Christian mysticism. Over sixty years ago, R.C. Zaehner did much to popularize “nature mysticism” as one of his three forms of mysticism. According to Zaehner, “the experience that tells you that you are all and that all is you,” which some mystics testify to, is not so much “pan-theism” (“all-God-ism”), as a form of “pan-en-hen-ism” (“all-in-one-ism”), which, Zaehner says, is the “experience of the nature mystic” (Zaehner 1957, pp. 28–29).1 He notes how accounts of such experiences can be found in many religious traditions, such as Hinduism, and also in some nineteenth-century authors (e.g., Richard Jeffries). How helpful is the category of nature mysticism for the history of Christian mysticism?
Reflecting on Romans 1:20 about seeing God “through the things he has made,” I do not find the concept of nature mysticism very useful for Christianity, precisely because the Christian mystics were not interested in “nature” as an independent realm, let alone in feeling that they can become one with all that exists. Rather, their concern was with nature as “creation,” that is, the relation of the world we see and experience to its Maker. It is not that these thinkers do not talk about natura with originality and sophistication (e.g., Otten 2020),2 but rather that the notion of “nature” used in “nature mysticism” does not map well on their concerns, due to its emphasis on natura apart from Deus. What I find in Christian mysticism is a set of variations on what I would call “theophanic mysticism,” that is, how the world as manifestation (theophania) reveals and conceals the unknowable mystery of God. God is seen in and through the world as a veil whose beauty both entices and frustrates our gaze towards the divine mystery. Many mystics, emphasizing the veiling aspect, have had negative things to say about the world and its beauty; others have praised the beauty of creation’s veil as a way to the Beloved.
This article was originally published in Religions and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
- Zaehner, Robert Charles. 1957. Mysticism Sacred and Profane. An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Preternatural Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [↩]
- Otten, Willemien. 2020. Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking. From Eriugena to Emerson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [↩]
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