Contrasting Visions of Reality

Today the Church celebrates St. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit figure during the counter-refomation who forced Galileo Galilei to abjure and forsake the Copernican heliocentric theory. Later Bellarmine supported Heliocentrism. Also today the church celebrates Hildegard von Bingen Medieval Mystic. What a contrast in visions of reality.

One wonders what is really true, that the earth is merely a planet running around a sun.  Something of an atom in the molecule we call the Milky Way, of the greater much greater universe.  If one contemplates it one soon is impressed with the vastness of space and one is in awe of the fact that we are not even a speck on a tiny planet tucked away somewhere in a inconsequential galaxy, lost somewhere in a small corner of the vast universe of galaxies which greatly outnumber people.  We can wonder about it merely because we know it to be true.  But if we take a further look at recent scientific understandings of reality, we are not even a speck, but a small matrix of energy strings.  Curious isn't it that the more we know, the more insignificant we become, compared to the vastness of everything that is.

But Hildegard has a different vision.  One in which wisdom takes on a primary role:

"I heard a voice saying to me, "This Lady whom you see is Love, who has Her dwelling place in eternity." When God wished to create the world, He leaned down, and with tender Love, provided all that was needed, as a parent prepares an inheritance for a child. And thus, in a mighty blaze the Lord ordained all His works.
Then creation recognized its Creator in its own forms and appearances. For in the beginning, when God said, "Let it be!" and it came to pass, the means and the Matrix of creation was Love, because all creation was formed through Her as in the twinkling of an eye." - trans. B. Newman

.When we leave the physical world we find ourselves captivated by the noematic reality of thought, the real is the miracle of consciousness.  When a child is born it is not the fact that a physical being comes into existence, but that a new consciousness makes its appearance on the scene.  It is a contrast of the spirit with the body.  For we are not, unless we are both spirit (consciousness) and body.  Not merely a matrix of energy strings, but yet a matrix of energy we call love.  The great Philosophers of the past, have seen the value of both the spiritual and the material. But we should not confuse the spiritual with the mental, for spirit is more than mind, mind is only the precondition for spirit.  I think of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, the Medievals, Leibniz, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Royce, Hocking, Marcel, Husserl and even Edith Stein when I think on the philosophers who were in touch with spirit.  What makes us today in the 21st century abandon spirit in our explanations?  Is it perhaps that mystic has had a bad name?  But who can truthfully say that the mystic does not have a vision that others in our midst lack?