The Season of Incarnation
We are in the season of Incarnation—God becoming flesh. It is a beautiful time of the year that brings out the best of humanity, even in the worst of situations. During this season more than any other, we see the deeper meaning of our reality: love is our true nature, and care for one another humanizes us.
Teilhard de Chardin described the physical structure of the universe as love—”the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.” Love is the energetic presence of a creative and unitive force within evolution, irreducible to measurement yet showing itself as passionate desire: the excess of life reaching for more life.
If love is our deepest reality and the universe is our deepest connection, then what we are about as humans must be aligned with our cosmic reality. To be human-centered but not cosmic-centered creates confusion. Teilhard once wrote that the artificial separation between humans and cosmos lies at the heart of our contemporary moral confusion. There are not two realities—cosmos and person; there is only one reality: cosmic personhood. If we are born of Mother Earth, is not the Earth our first teacher of life? Many of the principles that stand behind our fractured world today are either ancient in origin or stale in content. We have become a people of abstract concepts and abstract ideals in a world of abstract realities. When the mind is detached from matter, love weakens and we lose our focus.
The story of the great disconnect in the West is one that has its roots in scholasticism, as knowledge shifted from experiential to conceptual, consolidating with Descartes’ revolution of mind separated from matter. The two great lights of the thirteenth century were Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Thomas Aquinas stands as perhaps the most influential architect of medieval theology, a brilliant mind who built a cathedral of thought so magnificent and comprehensive that it both illuminated and, paradoxically, obscured the simple power of early Christian experience. His theology was based on Aristotelian metaphysics, establishing God as pure actuality (actus purus)—the unmoved mover existing as Being itself (esse ipsum).1 Bonaventure, on the other hand, was deeply influenced by Francis of Assisi, and based his theology on the Incarnation, the relational God of overflowing love. Whereas Thomas was an architect of the spirit, Bonaventure was an artist of the soul.
The Franciscan intellectual tradition, despite its rich theological contributions and distinctive philosophical insights, remained largely peripheral to the dominant currents of Catholic intellectual life. When Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology gained official endorsement—particularly after Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris—Thomas’s Metaphysics of Being became the standard framework for Catholic philosophical education. This institutional privileging of Thomism had the effect of marginalizing alternative scholastic traditions, including Franciscan theology.
I have wondered how the Church would have developed, if Franciscan theology had become mainstream. Franciscan theologians developed their philosophical framework with the spiritual vision of Francis of Assisi as their guiding light. For them, the central metaphysical challenge was not abstract speculation but a lived reality: how to articulate a philosophy adequate to the mystery of a God who enters creation through the Incarnation and remains intimately present within the material world. Despite the technical complexity of Duns Scotus’s philosophical distinctions, his fundamental concern—shared with his Franciscan predecessors—was profoundly pastoral and experiential: the question of divine-human relationality in a cosmos transformed by the Word made flesh. This required nothing less than a reformulation of metaphysics itself, one that could accommodate an Incarnational God who does not merely touch creation from outside but dwells within it. It is time to reclaim the Franciscan alternative as mainstream theology, primarily because it is most coherent with a universe waking up to new life.
Francis of Assisi was an unlearned man who understood cosmic life as the teacher of human action. He was bodily and earthy. As his feet touched the earth, he felt the heart of God.2 God was not a thought but an activity, a movement of love from heaven to earth, from riches to poverty, a God who becomes dependent on us to return love for love. For Francis, God was shorthand for love, love bending low, love in the suffering of creatures, love as the splendor of the sun’s beauty and the flowers’ smile.3 Francis experienced the God of compassionate love within himself and in all others, indeed, in every aspect of creation. “In beautiful things Francis saw Beauty itself,” Bonaventure wrote, “and from each and every thing he made for himself a ladder by which he could climb up and embrace his beloved.” 4
Francis recognized that the God of his own life was the same God of the leper, the poor person, the flowers and birds. His biographer Thomas of Celano tells us that he would pick up worms on the road so that they would not be crushed by those passing by. He would preach to flowers as if they had reason. He called each creature by name, as if they were related to him and endowed with reason.5 His was a penetrating gaze of reality. Bonaventure wrote that every creature—Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Sister stars, Sister mother earth—all proclaim God.
Scotus developed a sophisticated philosophy based on the generosity of God’s love and the unitive nature of love. According to Scotus, there is something intrinsic to each being that makes it singular and unrepeatable. Each possesses its own “thisness” that cannot be reduced to a “common nature.” Each person and creature “speaks” God’s presence in the uniqueness of its own beingness. For Scotus, God is God of the particular. Each person, leaf, earthworm and fly is an unrepeatable expression of God’s love; without each created being, the infinite wholeness of divine love would be incomplete. We are not simply persons reaching toward a mystery of divine being; rather each person is a particular expression of God’s love. God does not love each person out of general benevolence toward “humanity.” God rejoices in this particular life—each person’s gifts and struggles and unique way of seeing the world. The logic of haecceitas undermines any hierarchy of values based on ideal categories—race, gender, class, species.
In Scotus’s world, each being’s value derives from its unique being, its thisness, not from where it falls in some abstract taxonomy. Scotus calls this principle the individuating entity (entitas individualis). Alan Wolter notes that this individuating entity, though formally distinct from the common nature (the “you” of your humanity), forms a unity with that nature so that singularity is intrinsic and not accidental to any individual. That is, there is only one irrepeatable “you.” Hence what makes an individual an individual—a “this” and “not that”— is absolutely intrinsic and identical to that thing’s very existence or being. As Jeremiah Hackett writes: “For Duns Scotus, the individual is more perfect than shared nature; an individual is a unique thing which is defined by its own uniqueness… something is included in the very nature of the individual which is lacking in the shared nature.”6 In other words, the particular is metaphysically richer than the universal because of the individuating “thisness” that makes it unrepeatable. What provides for our “common nature” is the particularity of lives. What we hold in common is our uniqueness, our distinctiveness. Each person is the whole and the whole is in each person.
What makes Scotus’s ideas novel and contemporary is that universality is not abstract. It does not refer to an elusive “common nature” or participation in divine goodness. It refers to the individual nature of every existent, from leptons and quarks to trees, bees, whales and humans. God’s love is the reason anything exists, and the reason anything exists is because God loves without measure. When God becomes an idea, a concept or a spiritual abstraction, matter is stripped of love.
The infinite generosity of divine love means that every single person, whether a homeless person or migrant worker or housewife, is irrepeatable and infinitely valuable because in this person God’s infinite love is wondrously present. God is like this and this is God. When we live our individuated lives fully, rather than flattening them into some socially acceptable category, we live out our divine life.
Franciscan theologians thought the Incarnation should make a metaphysical difference. Bonaventure explained that metaphysics—the study of what reality is, its ultimate principles—begins with particulars then moves toward understanding the bigger picture of existence itself. As Zachary Hayes states, this approach takes “a particular human experience in the world” and uses it “as the basic clue as to how things are in general.”7 In other words, we understand the universe by carefully examining our concrete experiences and seeing what they reveal about the nature of everything. In his view, the Incarnation fundamentally affects how we should think about reality itself.
Knowledge is a matter of vision. One must be able to see with the outer eye (the physical eye), the inner eye (the eye of the heart) and the third eye (the contemplative eye), the eye that sees the truth of all things. This threefold method of seeing for Bonaventure is the basis of wisdom, knowledge deepened by love.8 Bonaventure’s threefold eye of sense, heart, and contemplation anticipates what Teilhard would later call “seeing from within.” For both thinkers, true vision arises when perception is transfigured by love. The contemplative eye does not escape the world but penetrates it, discerning in the depths of matter the radiance of spirit. Where Bonaventure spoke of ascending through the vestiges of creation toward the divine source, Teilhard perceived creation itself as the unfolding transparency of that source. To see rightly is to perceive unity shining through multiplicity—the world illumined by the light of the Word. The true knower, then, is not a detached observer but a seeker, a treasure hunter who traces the hidden pathways of divine love within each particular entity. The poet G.M. Hopkins spoke of the Christic, the divine love woven into the veins of a leaf or shell of a clam. God is known in the particularities of existence.
There is no doubt that Scotus was inspired by Francis of Assisi. Francis did not call the sun his brother and the moon his sister metaphorically—he recognized the individual personality of each creature in the cosmic family. When he preached to the birds at Bevagna, he was not addressing “birds in general” but these particular swallows, finches, and doves gathered on that specific day. Each bird possessed its own thisness, its own unrepeatable expression of divine creativity. Francis saw what Scotus would later articulate philosophically: God creates not according to types but as singular expressions of divine love. The famous story of Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio illustrates the particularity of love. A ravenous wolf was roaming the small town of Gubbio and threatening the people who feared to go outside. Francis was passing through Greccio and heard about the dangerous wolf. He asked to speak to the wolf and the people were horrified. The townspeople saw only “a dangerous wolf”—a generic threat to be eliminated, an instance of wolf-nature gone wrong. Francis saw this particular wolf, with its own history, its own hunger, its own thisness. He did not approach the wolf as a representative of “wolf-nature” but as a unique individual capable of relationship. “Brother Wolf,” Francis called him—recognizing the wolf’s irreplaceable particularity within God’s family.9 The resolution came not through a town council meeting but through honoring both the wolf’s uniqueness and the townspeople’s particular needs. The covenant Francis brokered worked because it respected the thisness of all parties—this wolf, these people, this situation. The wolf was not reformed by being forced into a mold of “proper wolf behavior”; he was integrated into the community by having his particular needs met in ways that also honored the particular needs of the townspeople.
This is what Scotus means by haecceitas, every being possesses an intrinsic principle of singularity that makes it unrepeatable. Your existence is not just an instance of “human nature” but a unique expression that adds something to reality that could never exist otherwise. The Franciscans understood the Incarnation as the masterpiece of divine love. God does not create according to types and then breathe life into them; God creates each being as a singular word of love, unrepeatable and irreplaceable. As Bill Short OFM states: “God did not come as an idea, a message or a thought; God came as a baby, a particular baby in a particular place at a particular time and God embraces that.”10
Scotus reminds us that the mystical and the particular are not opposites but partners. The more we know our unique thisness, the more we know God. The deeper we go into our irreplaceable individuality, the closer we come to the God who loves us precisely in our particularity. This is the ultimate paradox and ultimate truth: in becoming most fully myself, I become most fully united with God and all creation. My thisness is not what separates me from others; it is what most intimately connects us. If my own being expresses something of God’s being, then I am connected to everything God loves. The thisness of my life and every life—the particularity of each existence—becomes the basis of universal love. There is no abstract divine essence I must depend on for life, separate from my concrete existence. The divine essence is woven into the mystery of my life and expressed in the particular way I love. My uniqueness is not secondary to my life in God; it is God’s life in me, a gift to celebrate and offer to the world. This resolves the false dichotomy between mysticism (as dissolution of individuality into the One) and particularity (conceived as separate selfhood). In Scotus’s vision, the deepest mystical union with God does not erase but fulfills individuality—I become most united with God by becoming most fully my unique self.
The Call to Sacred Living
Recognizing our sacred thisness is not merely philosophical—it is a call to live with dignity and responsibility as an unrepeatable expression of divine love. Every person—rich, poor, gay, trans, straight—has a sacred thisness, a divine depth of Loving Presence that constitutes the particularity of personhood. If I am truly irreplaceable, then my choices matter infinitely. My decisions make a difference to God’s life and how God’s life is experienced in the world. If my thisness is sacred, then going to church is not my first duty. My first duty is to love, to be called into relationship. Real worship is how I live, not whether I attend Mass. This means approaching each day with reverence for the miracle of existence, treating my body as a temple, my relationships as opportunities for divine encounter, my work as creative collaboration with God. It means recognizing that every moment offers an opportunity to express my unique thisness in service of love. When I write, teach, parent, befriend, or simply breathe, I am contributing something to the universe that could never exist otherwise. My particular expression of love—shaped by my history, my struggles, my gifts, my limitations—adds to the cosmic beauty in ways no other being could replicate.
It also means treating every other being with the same reverence, recognizing that each person possesses irreplaceable thisness, sacred uniqueness deserving honor and protection. The world becomes a community of unrepeatable loves, a gathering of divine words all speaking the language of love in their own tongues—a cosmic Pentecost where every voice adds something that could never be said otherwise.
For Scotus, it is the irrepeatable uniqueness of every person that constitutes “common nature.” That is, what we hold in common is our individuality. Scotus’s theology is both affirmation and invitation. It affirms that you are loved beyond measure, sacred beyond description, irreplaceable beyond duplication. And it invites us to live into truth with courage, creativity, and compassion—knowing that in being most fully yourself, you express most fully the love of God in the world. This love is the gift of your very existence. You need only recognize it, celebrate it, and offer it freely to a world that is incomplete without the unique light that only you can shine.
Everything that exists is the ineffable mystery of God’s love, expressed in infinite variety, each being a unique note in the cosmic symphony that would be poorer without your particular voice. Francis of Assisi understood this when he told his brothers, “Preach the gospel by your example.”11 Your life—your unique, unrepeatable, sacred thisness—is the gospel. Living it authentically, lovingly, courageously is the most powerful sermon you will ever give. The world does not need another generic Christian trying to conform to an abstract ideal of holiness. The world needs you—your particular gifts, your unique perspective, your irreplaceable way of loving.
Scotus gives us permission to be fully ourselves without guilt or apology, knowing that our uniqueness is precisely what God delights in. The spiritual journey is not about transcending or escaping our particularity but embracing and perfecting it. In becoming the person only you can be, you reveal the face of God that only you can show. This is the ultimate freedom and the ultimate responsibility: to live your thisness as an act of worship, offering your unrepeatable self as gift to God and world.
Here’s to Divine love in 2026!
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.3, a.1; q.4, a.1; q.44, a.1. See also Ilia Delio, “From Aquinas to Teilhard: Divine Action and the Metaphysics of Love,” Heythrop Journal 59, no. 2 (2018): 472–474, where I discuss Aquinas’s appropriation of Aristotelian metaphysics and his conception of God as actus purus and esse ipsum subsistens. ↩︎
- llia Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation: Learning to Live in a Sacramental World (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2003), 12–15. ↩︎
- Francis of Assisi, “Letter to the Entire Order,” in Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short, eds., Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Vol. 1: The Saint (New York: New City Press, 1999), 63–67. ↩︎
- Bonaventure, Legenda Maior Sancti Francisci [The Major Legend of Saint Francis], in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Vol. 2: The Founder, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2000), 586; see also Zachary Hayes, Bonaventure: Mystical Writings (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 49–52. ↩︎
- Thomas of Celano, The Life of Saint Francis [Vita Prima Sancti Francisci], in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Vol. 1: The Saint, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), 264–65; see also Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation, 18–20. ↩︎
- Jeremiah Hackett, “John Duns Scotus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 162. ↩︎
- Hayes, “Christ: Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity,” 6. ↩︎
- Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 59–61; Hayes, Bonaventure: Mystical Writings, 25–27; see also Ewert H. Cousins, The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, and the Life of St. Francis (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 27–29. ↩︎
- See The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi (Fioretti di San Francesco), ch. 21, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Volume 3: The Prophet, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2001), 617–19. For a theological reading of the Wolf of Gubbio narrative in light of Franciscan metaphysics, see Ilia Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation: Learning to Live in a Sacramental World (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 2003), 52–55. ↩︎
- William J. Short, OFM, in Margaret Pirk, “Franciscan Christology” ↩︎
- Francis of Assisi, “Earlier Rule” ↩︎