Philip Sherrard

The divorce between the spiritual and the material means that material forms are regarded as totally non-spiritual, and thus either as illusion or as only to be known through identifying their reality with their purely material aspects. Such a debasement of the physical dimension of things is tantamount not only to denying the spiritual reality of our own created existence, but also, through depriving natural things of their theophanic function, to treating a Divine revelation as a dead and soulless body.

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Originally published in Not of this World: A Treasury of Christian Mysticism, edited by James S. Cutsinger. World Wisdom, Inc., 2003. Republished here with warm thanks.