For the Christian the world is not an orphan; nor is it simply an emanation of the absolute. Springing fresh from the hands of the living God, there it stands, desired by God, rejoicing and delighting in him with the joy described in the psalms and in the book of Job, when the morning stars sang together – a ‘musical commandment’, a ‘marvelously composed hymn’, as St Gregory of Nyssa said in his commentary on the Psalms (PG, XLIV, 441 B).
The creature is a ceaseless movement from nothingness to existence, attracted by the infinite; a movement during which time, space, and material form are simultaneously bestowed. ‘This world is a semi-being in perpetual flux, constantly evolving, never still; and beyond, the attentive ear is attuned to another reality’ (Paul Florensky).
So the Christian views nature as a new reality, true and dynamic, quickened, as the Fathers say, by a ‘luminous’ force put in it by God to draw it towards transcendence. Consequently, according to Florensky, only in Christianity can the true meaning of createdness be seen, where all scientific research into nature rests on the biblical revelation: ‘Only then could something created be seen as more than the devil’s bauble, a sort of emanation, or illusion of divinity, like the rainbow in a drop of water; only then could the world be thought of as a creature of God, autonomous in his being, his righteousness and his authority.’
At the same time, the glory of God is revealed at the very root of things, for the roots of the creature are essentially heavenly. According to its logos, its ‘name’, the living word by which and in which God holds it in being, the creature expresses the divine glory after its own fashion and by its very existence. For ‘there is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory’ (1 Cor. 15.41).
Where these complementary approaches meet, the Christian idea of the symbol is born. The world is not God, but his temple, his ‘place’, as the contemplatives call the ‘heart’. The more plentiful nature is, the more alive and bursting with its own vital energy, the greater is its symbolic significance. The symbol is not a ‘veneer’ applied to things; it is their very substance, the dynamism of their nature called to fulfil itself in God.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
