Logos and Creation
The fundamental cosmic intuition of the Christian spiritual path is that creation is the manifestation of an order that at one and the same time transcends it, sustains it from within and manifests itself through it. This intrinsic, transcendent, immanent order is the Logos — the eternal son of God. The term ‘Logos’ in Christian theology marries, through the revelation of St. John’s Gospel and the Epistles of Paul, its Greek philosophical meaning of an all-encompassing rational order uniting nature, society, individual humans and divinity into ‘a great cosmos’ [5] with the Christian theological meaning of Christ, the Word (Logos) of God, in, through and by whom all things are created and “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). It is thus the supreme ordering principle uniting all levels of being, from the sublimity of the Divine to the deepest density of the mineral kingdom.
According to three great Christian masters of cosmological vision, St. Ephrem the Syrian (306-373), Dionysius the Areopagite (circa 500) and Maximos the Confessor (580-662), the reciprocal imbeddedness of cosmos and Church is grounded in the primordial imbeddedness of all creation in God.
St. Ephrem the Syrian
St. Ephrem the Syrian was a great theologian, and one of the greatest writers in the Syriac language, as the following excerpt from one of his hymns shows.
As water surrounds the fish and it feels it,
So also do all natures feel God.
He is diffused through the air,
And with thy breath enters into thy midst.
He is mingled with the light,
And enters, when thou seest, into thy eyes.
He is mingled with thy spirit,
And examines thee from within, as to what thou art.
In thy soul He dwells …
Ephrem here represents God as the water, and all creatures as sea creatures. Just like the sea, God both contains and transcends his creatures. He is not only over all things, but also in and around and embracing all things. The separation implied in Divine transcendence never nullifies the unity implied in Divine immanence.
St. Dionysius the Areopagite
St. Dionysius the Areopagite lived in the late fifth or early sixth century. He was a great Christian neoplatonic philosopher, ascetic and speculative genius. Dionysius completes the picture or world-image of the traditional Christian cosmology. [6]
His most important contribution is undoubtedly his concept of hierarchy in the cosmos. Dionysius is, as far as we know, the first person in literature ever to have used the word ‘hierarchy’. He seems to have coined the term. This profoundly Orthodox Christian concept is vital for a conception of the cosmos that includes not only the beings and activities of the visible world but also the ‘invisible’ world; beings and activity of the subtle, celestial or angelic worlds, not susceptible of scientific measurement, yet part of the order of created nature.
“A hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the Divine.” [7] What does Dionysius mean by “approximating as closely as possible to the Divine”? His very next sentence gives the explanation: “It is uplifted to the imitation of God in proportion to the enlightenments divinely given to it.”
According to Dionysius, then, the order, understanding and activity of the hierarchically-ordered cosmos is the sanctifying beauty of the Divine image, revealed simultaneously in the being, in the knowing of and in the activity of the hierarchy. A hierarchy, then, contrary to the popular Church notion, is not a ‘chain of command’; or an organizational chart representing a system of authority that is imposed from above upon a mass of individuals who are not pan of the authority structure. To Dionysius, the sacred concept of hierarchy applied not only to the world of angels but to the world of visible nature. To quote from his treatise on the Church, the priesthood and the sacraments, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy:
“We have a venerable sacred tradition which asserts that every hierarchy is the complete expression of the sacred elements comprised within it. It is the perfect total of all its sacred constituents. Our own hierarchy is therefore said to embrace every one of its sacred constituents. Talk of ‘hierarch’ and one is referring to a holy and inspired man, someone who understands all sacred knowledge, someone in whom an entire hierarchy is completely perfected and known.” [8
In other words, the created order itself — the universe — in the Dionysian conception, is a God-given means of fulfillment, salvation and transfiguration for all its constituent parts or members. This is to say that human beings cannot be ‘saved’ without ‘saving’ the Creation. In Orthodox Christian terms, without the transfiguration of the cosmos, there is no ‘deification’ of human beings. Central to this, is the crucial insight that the purpose of the created order is “to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with Him.” In the understanding of the ancient Church, the universe, far from being either an illusion or a vast mindless material force, is a Divine revelation and a sacred means of salvation, enlightenment and ‘at-one-ment’.
(5.) Roy A. Rappaport. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 349.
(6.) Thomas Aquinas himself quotes Dionysius some 1700 times in his works.
(7.) Cel. Hier. 3,1. (PG 3-164D).
~By Vincent Rossi, Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition, taken from Business Life (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2465/is_1_30/ai_59520591/?tag=content;col1).
Vincent Rossi is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and environmentalist, and founder of Epiphany Journal, a quarterly on traditional Christian spirituality. He is an Associate of World Stewardship Institute in Santa Rosa, California.
