This morning I was thinking about two very different images of creation, and a sentence of Simone Weil’s that sits underneath both.
Hildegard of Bingen saw the cosmos as an egg (Scivias I.3): an immense structure of fire, air, water, winds, stars and earth. For Hildegard the physical world discloses a deeper divine order. Creation is not spiritually empty. It speaks to us of God, Christ, the Church, good and evil, judgement and redemption, with Christ at its radiant centre. I was particularly struck by her image of the Church as the moon, reflecting Christ’s light.
Julian of Norwich, writing more than two centuries later, saw something much smaller: a little thing in the palm of her hand, “the quantity of an hazel-nut”. She was told: “It is all that is made.” It seemed so fragile that she wondered why it did not fall into nothing. The answer she received was that “it lasteth … for that God loveth it”.
Both women saw creation as held within God. What differs is scale and posture. Hildegard looks outwards at a cosmos saturated with meaning. Julian looks down at something small enough to hold, and asks why it does not simply vanish.
Weil helps me see why it should be fragile. She understands creation as an act of divine restraint: in making something other than himself, God makes room for freedom and otherness. Creation is an act of love because God does not continually overwhelm it with divine power. As Weil says, “God is good before he is powerful” (Gravity and Grace), the order matters. The question then becomes how that power is revealed and exercised within creation.
Julian also says, “I saw no wrath but on man’s part.” She neither denies the terrible reality of sin and suffering nor pretends to understand how everything will finally be healed. She was assured that “all shall be well”, but the final working out of God’s love remained hidden from her.
The cross has become central to how I understand divine power. It does not explain suffering, or make it good. It does show God present within it: not directing events from outside, but accepting vulnerability and bearing its wounds alongside us.