Theology against Platonism

Lest it be suspected that my hidden motive for speaking of creation as language is a desire to argue for a metaphysical hierarchy of correspondences, a symbolic economy between the world's “inner” and “outer” texts, I should say that, for biblical reasons, the world can be imagined as a realm of divine semeia only in a principally “rhetorical” sense: the liber naturae is a text of majestic lucidity, whose exquisite and terrible intricacies are stylistic, not hermetic; the world is not a vast system of auguries and “symbols,” merely pointing away from itself to a realm of rational or magical essences. Scripture attests to God speaking his glory in creation, not his arcana; the invisible things of him are clearly seen. It is as a kind of poetry that the discourse of being is revelatory, as endless sequences of beautiful turns of phrase, and the proper response to this language — the reply that properly grasps, interprets, and corresponds to the truth of creation — is doxology. The Word comprehends all words transcendently, not as a great silence destitute of speech, but as the fullness of utterance, a “sounding silence” of utter plenitude, the Father's entire depth expressed in the agile radiance of the Spirit. As all talk of “substance” is most properly deferred to God, and then as the “effect” of the infinite discourse that God is, creation should be seen as a kind of miraculous wordplay, a brilliant persiflage within the “logic” of the Trinity, demonstrating the inexhaustible richness of God's Word in the endless diversity of its combinations.

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 2003. (292)