The universe is present to Man as the first revelation he receives, and it is his task to interpret it creatively, to give conscious utterance to the ontological praise of things. The world is also, in impersonally female guise, presented to Man, to be united with him in a mystical marriage, forming one flesh with him. The whole sensible universe is an extension of our body. Or rather, as we have already said, and in biblical terms, our body is simply the form which the person, our ‘living soul’, impresses on the universal ‘dust’. There is no discontinuity between the flesh of the world and that of Man; the world is the body of humanity. Man is a ‘little world’, a ‘microcosm’, which sums up, distils, recapitulates the degrees of created being, so he knows the world from the inside. The first account of creation in Genesis (1.26-31) describes Man the microcosm as being created after the other beings, but assimilated to them by the same blessing, appearing as the summit and completion of evolution.
All the same, the human being is, as we know, much more than a microcosm; the human being is a person in the image of God. In our personal freedom we transcend the universe, not in order to abandon it but to contain it, to utter its meaning, to mediate grace to it. Through humanity, the universe is called to become the ‘image of the image’ (St Gregory of Nyssa). It is in this sense that the Fathers understand the second account of the creation (Genesis 2.4-25) which sees in Man the basic principle of the created world. Only Man is quickened by the very breath of God, and without him the ‘plants’ could not grow, as if they were rooted in him. And it is he who ‘names’ the animals, discerning their spiritual essences. Only Man – who is priest as well as king – can bring out the secret sacramentality of the universe. Adam was put in the world to ‘cultivate’ it, to perfect its beauty. It was Vladimir Soloviev’s profound observation that the vocation of the human race is to become a collective cosmic Messiah and ‘subdue the earth’, that is to say transfigure it.
For the universe, therefore, humanity is its hope of obtaining grace and being united to God. Man is also its risk of failure and degeneration, because, if he turns away from God, he will see only the outward appearance of things and impose a false ‘name’ on them. St Paul, in a basic text, describes a state of fallenness and redemption, but one where we see revived, in Christ, the vocation of humanity as mediator: ‘The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of [men as] the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of him [man, the mediator] who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Romans 8.19-21). So everything that happens in humanity is of universal significance, being imprinted on the universe. Humanity’s fate determines the fate of the cosmos.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
