person.”
“That’s true.”
“That’s more or less how it is with God’s Creation and the Bible. We can
recognize that there is a God just by walking around in the natural world. We can
easily see that He loves flowers and animals, otherwise He would not have made
them. But information about God, the person, is only found in the Bible—or in God’s
‘autobiography,’ if you like.”
“You’re good at finding examples.”
“Mmmm...”
For the first time Alberto just sat there thinking— without answering.
“Does all this have anything to do with Hilde?” Sophie could not help asking.
“We don’t know whether there is a ‘Hilde’ at all.”
“But we know someone is planting evidence of her all over the place. Postcards,
a silk scarf, a green wallet, a stocking ...”
Alberto nodded. “And it seems as if it is Hilde’s father who is deciding how
many clues he will plant,” he said. “For now, all we know is that someone is sending
us a lot of postcards. I wish he would write something about himself too. But we shall
return to that later.”
“It’s a quarter to eleven. I’ll have to get home before the end of the Middle
Ages.”
“I shall just conclude with a few words about how Aquinas adopted Aristotle’s
philosophy in all the areas where it did not collide with the Church’s theology. These
included his logic, his theory of knowledge, and not least his natural philosophy. Do
you recall, for example, how Aristotle described the progressive scale of life from
plants and animals to humans?”
Sophie nodded.
“Aristotle believed that this scale indicated a God that constituted a sort of
maximum of existence. This scheme of things was not difficult to align with Christian
theology. According to Aquinas, there was a progressive degree of existence from
plants and animals to man, from man to angels, and from angels to God. Man, like
animals, has a body and sensory organs, but man also has intelligence which enables
him to reason things out.
Angels have no such body with sensory organs, which is why they have
spontaneous and immediate intelligence. They have no need to ‘ponder,’ like humans;
they have no need to reason out conclusions. They know everything that man can
know without having to learn it step by step like us. And since angels have no body,
they can never die. They are not everlasting like God, because they were once created
by God. But they have no body that they must one day depart from, and so they will
never die.”
“That sounds lovely!”
“But up above the angels, God rules, Sophie. He can see and know everything
in one single coherent vision.”
“So he can see us now.”
“Yes, perhaps he can. But not ‘now.’ For God, time does not exist as it does for
us. Our ‘now’ is not God’s ‘now.’ Because many weeks pass for us, they do not
necessarily pass for God.”
“That’s creepy!” Sophie exclaimed. She put her hand over her mouth. Alberto
looked down at her, and Sophie continued: “I got another card from Hilde’s father
yesterday. He wrote something like—even if it takes a week or two for Sophie, that
doesn’t have to mean it will be that long for us. That’s almost the same as what you