Book by Levi J. Pingleton, available through Kolbe Center:
Keep Me as the Apple of Thine Eye: A Theological Reflection on the Absolute Primacy of Christ
$25.00
https://kolbecenter.org/product/keep-me-as-the-apple-of-thine-eye-a-theological-reflection-on-the-absolute-primacy-of-christ/
Review by our friend Johnny Proctor:
Levi Pingleton penetrates the essential center of creation theology in Keep Me as the Apple of Thine Eye that challenges conventional orthodoxy and lifts the soul to God in unanticipated and spiritually edifying ways.
Coining a useful idiom to capture the main thesis, “Christocentric exemplarism” encompasses the mystery of the incarnation as both source and ultimate fructification of creation. Pingleton traces the mystical reflections of Saint Basil the Great, Saint Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and Saint Hildegard of Bingen with a deftly woven thread of their common affirmations regarding the divine purposes of creation, the incarnation, and the teleological summation of the ages. These he brings to a crescendo with an in-depth analysis of Christian anthropology as the hermeneutical key to unlock creation’s proclamation of the divine essences which ubiquitously appeal to men through the natural order.
These themes culminate in a compelling case for restoring the traditional cosmology of the Catholic Church to its rightful place in Christian pedagogy; Christocentric exemplarismappeals for a verdict from the sincere disciple.
The Church’s perennial and dogmatically asserted cosmology is geocentric, which is to say, as the Fathers all taught with one voice, the earth is at rest in the center of the cosmos. Pingleton argues gently and with understatedurgency for the traditional coherence between the metaphysical and the theological sciences as something most Christians know is missing implicitly but which evades them as a practical diagnosis. This wonderful coherence – which this book masterfully lays out for the reader –is in fact missing from modern understanding yet is constantly appealing to our consciences and intellects through the ‘speech and words’ of the created order (cf. Psalm 18).
The treatment of the Galileo affair of the 17th century is explained with meticulous footnoting and concise accounting of the major milestones leading to the modern misconception of the Church’s actual position. This section presents a defense of dogmatic development of the geocentric aspect of Patristic and medieval cosmology and its enduring value as the appropriate hermeneutical approach to both Scripture and metaphysics.
I personally appreciate how this book promotes cosmological coherence, encouraging a union of sacred and profane sciences within the Creator's intended order. Levi Pingleton elegantly presents this coherence as a spiritual necessity, as a mystical blueprint, and the proper exegesis of the intelligible universe. This brief study is desperately needed today in a theological milieu too often characterized by incoherence, ruptures between the natural and supernatural orders, and irreconcilable approaches to metaphysics, philosophy, and the science of divinity.Keep Me as the Apple of Thine Eye offers an authentically Catholic vision of creation gracefully traversing these disciplines in a brief and elegant structure that economizes argumentation without sacrificing substance.
