Orthodoxy & Creation
The Single Icon of God
The Creation and the Restoration of Sacred Cosmology
in the Christian Tradition
“Where is the life we have lost in living; where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge; where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
The world of phenomena is the theophanic world. This world is that world. It is not simply a reflection of the theophanic world in the sense that there is a relation of parallelism or mutual analogy or correspondence between them. All nature, from beginning to end constitutes a single icon of God. 1
The three poignant questions penned by T.S. Eliot over a half-century ago point us directly to the problem of the Christian practice of Creation-keeping as we face the new millennium.
The Christian conscience has lost its ancient cosmic wisdom, and needs to recover it. It needs to recover it not only as a theological warrant for earthealing, but as an essential and indispensible part of its life, its wisdom, its knowledge. The ancient and traditional Christian teaching on Creation is a type of sacred cosmology, that is to say, a knowledge of the sacred in nature, grounded in Scripture and spiritual wisdom and based upon the Christian Tradition as a way of life. Information as simply a collection of facts or purported facts alone about the natural world, it is not. But information in the etymological sense—to give form to, to be formed within by—this kind of in-form-ation is indeed what the traditional Christian teaching on the created cosmos intends. A form, metaphysically speaking, is not merely a “shape”, a surface, or a species, but the manifestation of the essential quality of a being’s existence. As James Cutsinger observes, form refers to “that quality by virtue of which a physical object, whether living or not, transfers the attention of those who perceive it through itself and along a kind of ontological corridor up and into its celestial archetype.”2
Insight into form is thus a kind of cosmic consciousness or knowledge that leads to wisdom. The science of forms is a basic element of a sacred cosmology, which understands the world not merely through physical facts alone but rather through the metaphysical transparency of beings. Sacred cosmology presupposes that physical realities are based on metaphysical realities, and that everything that exists is a visible and tangible symbol of its invisible and celestial archetype.
[See Part 3 for footnotes]
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