The spiritual discipline and mysticism of the early Church, which have come down to us chiefly through the Eastern .tradition, amount to a veritable ‘physics of the glorious body’. The body, being flooded with light, then illuminates the surrounding cosmos to which it is inseparably joined. Solovyev writes that by the act of descending to the roots of life, and crucifying the cosmic eros in order to transform it into a regenerating force, ‘we release psychosomatic energies which gradually take possession of our material surroundings and spiritualize them … The power of humanity’s creative genius, which is both carnal and spiritual, is simply the inversion, the direction inward of the same creative power which, directed outwardly into nature, results in … the physical multiplication of organisms.’
There are many miracles in the history of Christianity which witness, in their radiance, and their conquest of heaviness and time and space, to this spiritualizing of the body. Around the saints the whole atmosphere of nature is pacified; near to them the wild beasts, St Isaac the Syrian says, can smell the scent of Adam’s breath before the Fall…
The contemplation of nature therefore looms large in traditional Christian spirituality. Maximus the Confessor says we must discern the spiritual essences of beings and things ‘so that we may present them to God as offerings on behalf of the creation’ (Mystagogia, II). The universe, no longer objectified by our covetousness and blindness, will be identified with the Body of the Risen Lord. We shall understand the language of creation. ‘Everything around me now seemed beautiful,’ says the Russian pilgrim, ‘ … everything was praying, everything was singing glory to God! So I realized that one could learn “the language of creation” and converse with God’s creatures.’
The world then stands revealed as a church, whose altar is the ‘heart-spirit’ of the spiritual person, one who is motivated by cosmic charity: ‘What is a charitable heart?’ asks St Isaac the Syrian. ‘It is a heart enflamed with love for the whole creation … Whoever possesses such a heart will be unable to think of or see a creature without his eyes filling with tears of deep compassion … Such a one will pray unceasingly … even for the reptiles, out of the infinite pity which springs from a heart which is united to God’ (sentence 55).
Married love also, as we know, induces a sense of harmony with nature and a closer awareness of it. The life of the universe will be transfigured, to quote Rozanov, ‘not only by hermits in black but also by those richly attired for the bridal feast’, and ‘in the new earth that emerges there will be flowers, those flamboyant marks of sex.’
All civilization is a continual alternation between the return to paradise – in festivals, art, or holidays amongst the wonders of nature – and work, which is the humanization of the material world into a single body belonging to all. Here also we are called to co-operate with God in saving the universe. In our transformation of nature, no less than in our understanding of it, it is our role to live the great cosmic Eucharist: ‘We offer to thee thine own of thine own on behalf of all and for all’. So we must now face the problem of modern technology.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
