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Filling in for Alex in the Faith Bible class this morning, I read from C. S. Lewis’ The Four Loves on the way to thinking through the Incarnation with the class members. I love doing this stuff! Lewis wrote a beautiful treatment about the distinctions between Need-love and Gift-love, among other things, and in his discussion of Charity asserted that God is love, insisting that we can understand any of this at all only by starting with God:

We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential. . . . But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In Himself, at home in “the land of the Trinity,” he is Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian’s in which God carried in His hand a little object like a nut, and that nut was “all that is made.” (Harcourt, Brace and Co. edition, 126-7)

Well, my conception of God grew a bit when that image entered my mind. The greatest human minds of recent and present centuries, even in working groups, have not drawn the cosmic bounds, but Julian of Norwich described the universe shown to her as something like a nut in the hand of God — or in her own hand. Quibble — say she means the entire created order — and you may be right about that. But I doubt that her fourteenth-century cosmology differed much from the conception of its boundedness and limitations relative to the Creator God who so transcended it. She was writing about God’s love for his creation and created ones.
Consider her words on the matter in an older translation:

Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being 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, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,€”I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned [that is, in essence united] to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.

Lewis mentioned the thing in the hand of God; Julian placed it in her hand. I have no explanation for that, though Lewis’s prodigious memory may simply have remembered the analogy to the hand of God and that was what he wrote. But either way, the analogy is clear: if the Creator holds the entire Creation, as it were, as a tiny thing in his hand, Julian’s hand-with-tiny-thing is just as good an analogy.

These days I am thinking through this vision of God compared to the traditional Chinese vision of God in relation to the world. Actually, that is so difficult, for I am given to understand that the closest functional conception of God in traditional Chinese thought is not a transcendent, at the least “that beyond which a greater cannot be conceived” kind of God, or God revealed in Jesus Christ, but God in a limited, rather secular sense, that is, as the emperor. I am given also to understand how difficult it is for a Chinese to conceptualize the matter from the other direction. I’ll have more to say on it, later.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Religion (Again). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.