cosmos Archives - Page 3 of 4

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part X): The Great Divorce

09/25/2015

By the Middle Ages, however, with the rise of humanism and rationalism, there were already the beginnings of a breach between Christianity and a self-sufficient humanity. In Byzantium, and spreading into Franciscan Italy, there was an attempt, supported by a theology of the transfiguration of the body and the earth, to transfigure the renaissance, to divinize humanism. But this last phase of Byzantine culture, which seemed so promising, was swamped by Asian influence, while Western

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part IX): Christendom and its Systems of Thought

09/16/2015

We must not forget that from its beginning Christianity came into contact with a whole range of prehistoric systems of thought, whose influence penetrated the Mediterranean world after Alexander’s expedition, when Greek and Asian civilizations met; sciences of inner reality and underlying causes, animist or pan-psychic beliefs about existence, in which humanity and the cosmos are at one. Indian yoga and Chinese medicine, which even threaten to undermine Marxist historical materialism, are modern examples of

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part VIII): The Biblical Revelation, Foundation of Technology

07/30/2015

The real difficulty with modern technology is not technical but spiritual; what would humankind or nature need to be like, to feel at home in this ‘wild revolution’, as Edgar Morin called it? Left to itself, technical progress becomes the tool of the rich and powerful in their struggle for profit and mastery, while the real need, that hunger for bread and for truth to which we keep referring, is ignored. What we lack, in

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part VII): Church and Cosmos (Part II)

07/23/2015

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

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part VI): Church and Cosmos (Part I)

07/16/2015

Between the first and second comings of the Lord, between the God-man and the God-universe, between the fallen and transfigured states of being, stands the Church, as a boundary and a crossing-place. And every Christian, through communion with holy things, i.e. the Eucharist, and in the communion of saints, is himself a ‘living boundary’, a place where death passes over into life. The cosmic history of the Church is the history of a childbirth, that

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part V): The Cosmos Secretly Transfigured in Christ

07/09/2015

When the Son of God, the fullness of personal existence, becomes the Son of the Earth, he allows himself to be contained by the universe at one point in space and time; but in reality the universe is contained in him. He will not use his body to possess and exploit the world, but by his constantly Eucharistic attitude, he makes it a body of unity, flesh which is both cosmic and sacrificial. In him

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part IV): The Fall as a Cosmic Catastrophe

06/23/2015

The Fathers, by detailed study of the Bible, have demonstrated that the Fall was a truly cosmic catastrophe, eclipsing the paradisal state with a new state of universal existence. Man, the son of God, wished to kill the divine Father and take possession of Mother Earth. ‘Man,’ says Maximus the Confessor, ‘wished to lay hold on the things of God without God, before God and not according to God’s will.’ And so ‘he delivered the

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part III): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part II)

06/11/2015

The biblical revelation, understood symbolically, confronts us with an uncompromising anthropocentrism, which is not physical but spiritual. Because Man is at once ‘microcosm and microtheos’, both a summing up of the universe and the image of God; and because God, in order to unite himself to the world, finally became a human being; humanity is the spiritual axis of all creation at every level, in every sphere. The saints see the universe in God, pervaded

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part II): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part I)

06/03/2015

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

The Seventh Tuesday after Pascha: Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part I): The Mystery of Created Being

05/26/2015

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

Archive

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part X): The Great Divorce

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part IX): Christendom and its Systems of Thought

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part VIII): The Biblical Revelation, Foundation of Technology

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part VII): Church and Cosmos (Part II)

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part VI): Church and Cosmos (Part I)

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part V): The Cosmos Secretly Transfigured in Christ

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part IV): The Fall as a Cosmic Catastrophe

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part III): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part II)

Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part II): Humanity, Priest and King of the Universe (Part I)

The Seventh Tuesday after Pascha: Human Beings and the Cosmos (Part I): The Mystery of Created Being

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