Haecceity, Beauty, and Why God is Worth Praise

When talking about the Imago Dei today in class, I was particularly struck by Hugh, St. Victor's ideas of strengthening admiration for God by studying the visible world. We see this elsewhere in Christian thought. It's a bit like Guido's ideas of heaven: "heaven is fourfold, because heaven is supernatural, material, spiritual, and intellectual. Supernatural heaven is the Trinity itself. And concerning this heaven it is said in Genesis, 'Take in;' that is, look to, 'heaven;' that is, the Trinity, 'and number the stars;' that is, its perfections, 'if you can.'" (Guido, p. 285; Genesis 15:5, Douay Rheims Ver.). There's a reason that the Vatican to this day runs an observatory. 

Picture from the Vatican Observatory with the caption, deum creatorem venite adoremus, which fittingly means "Come let us worship God as Creator."
Also the basis for a catchy Christmas mass tune.

Somehow we become closer to worship when we use our physicality, our reason in Hugh's sense, our physical Godly image to see evidence of the miracles of God. The jumping off points for my thoughts was this quote that Rachel Fulton Brown brought up in class: "For, since this lower life is the image of the higher life, it was fitting that in those things which were made for this life proof be set before man of those things which look to the higher life" (Hugh, p. 100). It seems easy to draw a line from this quote to the medieval philosopher Dun Scotus' ideas on haecceity (thisness) and quiddity (whatness). To quickly define these terms, though many people have written more deeply about them, haecceity is the particular qualities of a thing that make it that particular thing, while the quiddity is the essence of a thing (which can be the same across an entire category of things). [N.B. some traditions use the Artisteliean term hypokeimenon to talk about the same essenceness.] For example, the quiddity of an apple may be that if it's tart and red and edible it's an apple, but the haecceity is the particular spots and sticker placement and seed count of that apple. 

St. John Duns Scotus, coiner of the terms haecceity and quiddity, riding on a cool chariot.
From here, where you can read more about him and his life.

But, you may ask, what does this have to do with religion and specifically medieval religion? Well, if it's true that for Scotus, "the haecceity is supposed to explain that property," then we have something that's not just scientific. Certainly, most of his work on haecceity seems to be interested in (pseudo) scientific examination of Nature and the nature of things, but, what about when people use these methods of examination to look at Nature that is Made by God™? Then we get a type of scientific study of the visible world, the "lower life" in Hugh's terms, that explains the properties of what it means to be something that's divinely made. 

To return to Hugh, everything "just" moves through God: "if it moves according to God, this is justice; if it moves without God or contrary to God, this is injustice" (p. 96). And, if we as human use our reason to observe the world, we are moving according to God, who gave us this fun(?) thing called free will:

God created the soul of the first man from nothing, and breathed it into a body taken and formed from earth through material, giving it sense and discernment of good and evil…that it might rule it through reason, and that in man himself sense might be subject to reason, reason to the Creator, and thus the body might move according to reason through sense, but reason move through free will according to God. (p. 96)

Maybe at this point, you feel like you've stumbled into the world of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, with all the angelic Whatsit, Who, and Which. [It's a good book filled with Christian imagery, if that's your thing.] So, perhaps bringing in a later variation of Scotus' and Hugh's ideas will help clarify it for you, as it did for me. We find this variation in Gerard Manley Hopkin's notions of inscape and instress. For Hopkins, who was a Victorian-era poet, the haecceity of something, the uniqueness of a thing, was evidence of God's divine power and creative ability. 

[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. (Norton Anthology 8th Edition, Vol. 2, emphasis mine) 

We, as humans who are "the most highly selved," being a direct result of God's image and likeness and free will and, well, sin (thanks, Adam and Eve) are able to enact this bridge between scientific observation and ontological contemplation. In viewing the "lower world" of matter and Nature and galaxy spirals, we can see evidence of both divine Creation--because all those things, and indeed all things, were made by Him--and evidence of Imago Dei--because we are specifically made by Him so that we both have a sort of quiddity that allows us all to employ reason and a distinct individual haecceity that allows us to recognize that thisness/inscape of everything else that's God-made. In this way, our visible qualities let us recognize the invisible qualities of Creation that are worthy of praise at the same time that our invisible qualities let us recognize the symmetry of the visible things.

To end, I'll quote a few Hopkins lines that show this relationship between the "lower," Earthly life and the "higher," divine life. For Hopkins and Hugh and maybe even Guido, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" ("God's Grandeur"). For Hopkins, the beauty of spring reflects Eden:

      

What is all this juice and all this joy?
        A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
  In Eden garden.

       ("Spring")

And, about the daily observance of haecceity, he writes, "Glory be to God for dappled things –". He continues,

       All things counter, original, spare, strange;
           Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
               With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.
    ("Pied Beauty")

I suppose the moral for these thinkers is that we should praise, love, and worship He who fathers-forth beauty. 

My "pied" (i.e., multi-colored) dog who is an example of God's created beauty. 

- LAJ