Aristotle said that God is "The Unmoved Mover" (ὃ οὐ κινούμενος
κινεῖ).
Aristotle was actually describing the Witness, who is more
inward to us than our very mind, ever silent and awake, shining through
us in the midst of the busiest activity. The Unmoved Mover is pure
Awareness.
When I was hanging out in Trappist monasteries in
France we sang this ancient Latin hymn, 'Rerum Deus' by St. Ambrose, at
interludes between hours of manual labor. Ambrose based his conception
of God here on Aristotle's Unmoved Mover.
'O God, creation’s secret force,
Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source,
Who from the morn till evening ray
Through all its changes guid’st the day'
When Raphael painted Aristotle's Unmoved Mover on the wall of the
Pope's apartment at the Vatican in 1518 (pictured above), he portrayed
God as a woman, setting the wheel of the zodiac in motion. In the
Biblical tradition, this Unmoved Mover and ever-silent Witness of action
is Hochmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek. She is the feminine divine, the
womb of creativity.
May all of us find the immovable silence at
the center of our turning; for great music, great poetry, great acts of
peace making, come from that stillness. This is my prayer for the new
year.
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