The Legibility of Nature and the Recovery of the Cosmos: Contemplative Hermeneutics and Albertson’s Geometrical Mystical Theology

David Albertson’s The Geometry of Christian Contemplation breaks the normative lock that radically apophatic approaches have held over the study of Christian mystical theology by recovering Tradition B — an aesthetics of supreme Form, of God as forma formarum — and developing a constructive retrieval of measure, geometry, and figure as theophanic traces of divine Form within the visible world. This paper engage Albertson’s project from the perspective of the liber naturae tradition, arguing that his geometrical counter-tradition runs parallel to — and helps clarify — the broader tradition in which the created world was understood as a book written by the finger of God, legible only to those properly formed for its reading. While Albertson’s recuperation of Tradition B draws primarily on Platonic form-theory and Pythagorean number-theology, the liber naturae tradition locates the “outscape” of divine presence not only in geometrical structures but in the symbolic density of creatures apprehended through contemplative paideia.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​