Abstract
Christianity’s attitude towards the natural world must attend to the theological affirmation of its creation ex nihilo by God. In the prologue to St. John’s Gospel, the Evangelist declares that “all things” were made through the Word of God, in whom is “life.” Love, according to this vision, permeates the natural world; indeed, it is within this love—which is the Word of God—that all other things subsist and have their being. In part by drawing upon the prior theological mystical tradition represented by the Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, and Nicholas of Cusa, this Chapter seeks to explicate the perspective of Christian poet and mystic Thomas Traherne (1636-74). Writing in the seventeenth century, Traherne gives an account of how and why the natural world should be loved which is striking for its eloquent and unambiguous affirmation of the world’s essential goodness. Traherne’s context is one in which new technological lenses, such as the microscope and telescope, had resulted in the rapid expansion of humanity’s epistemological horizons at both atomic and astronomical levels. This Chapter draws on Traherne’s invocation of another, older visual technology in his Meditations—the mirror—in order to illustrate a Christocentric theology which affirms the prerogative of human beings, qua bearers of the imago Dei, to attend to the world as, in Traherne’s words, “a mirror of infinit beauty.”