(Please note: In this blog I will refer to God the Creator as Abba, Aramaic for “father” or “dad,” per the recommendation of Jesus and St. Paul.)
Abba embeds beauty within the universe.
In previous blogs, we have discussed the relational nature of the universe, and the reliance of relationality upon time for its expression. The universe does not consist of separate objects that bounce off each other on occasion; the universe consists of interrelated synergies that derive their being from one another. This cosmic interrelatedness derives from the Trinity’s interrelated nature.
We will now explore a peak experience of relationship, the experience of beauty. In my book, The Great Open Dance, I discuss beauty while discussing the cosmos (Chapter Three), before discussing humankind (Chapter Four). This placement is an assertion. If we discuss beauty when discussing human experience, then we implicitly assert that beauty arises from our perception of the universe and does not preexist that perception. Beauty would have no being independent of us.
But if we discuss beauty before we discuss humanity, then we implicitly assert that beauty preexists us in the universe and was always there, waiting to be perceived. The Bible suggests that beauty, as an enjoyable quality of the universe, preexists us.
In the first chapter of Genesis, after each day of work but before the creation of humankind, Abba declares the result “good” (Hebrew: tov). Abba already enjoys the cosmos, even before humans join it. Yet, after Abba creates humans, Abba declares the universe “very good” (Hebrew: tov meod), because now humans can join Abba in that enjoyment. We can see the goodness that Abba sees, share that experience with one another, and praise Abba “in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 29:2b KJV).
But if the beauty of the cosmos is a gift, why is anything “achingly beautiful”? This experience is so common that writing programs identify “achingly beautiful” as a cliché. Why isn’t the experience of beauty an unalloyed pleasure?
Sin is separation—from God, one another, and the cosmos. Beauty is salt in that wound because beauty reminds us of our separation. The universe and its inhabitants are emanations of Abba, unique expressions of the divine nature. Just as the Sun produces light and heat, so Abba produces spirit and matter.
Abba created us for awareness of this primordial unity, but our capacity to perceive it has been lost, and our intuition tells us that we lost it. When we ache for beauty, we are aching for reunion. We sense the infinite within the finite and yearn for what we cannot fully receive.
Sometimes, in a state of agitation, we may want to possess beauty for ourselves. But we cannot extract anything from everything because it is all of a piece. Like clouds reflected in a stream, the object of desire cannot be extricated from its environs and placed within the sole possession of the self. We will come back empty handed and frustrated until we learn to revel in beauty, without possessiveness.
Cosmic evolution fosters the experience of beauty.
Among the three persons of the Trinity, Christ is Truth, Spirit is Wisdom, and Abba is Law. Although this may seem a restrictive designation for Abba, those who have known lawlessness best know the blessing of law. The opposite of law is chaos, and the correlate of law is cosmos.
Abba, as the Architect of cosmos, has blessed the universe with physical laws that govern the interaction of mass, energy, space, and time. Discerning these physical laws is like discerning the rules of a game that we are watching people play. We can’t see the rules themselves, but we see that the game is ordered, we infer the rules that provide that order, and we thank the Author of those rules.
In the human quest for understanding, the natural sciences seek to understand these physical laws. Over time, scientists have developed numerous symbol systems by which to analyze them—chemical notation, nuclear notation, gene nomenclature, mathematical physics, etc. Faith also calls us to study natural law, for within the cosmic order we encounter the mind of Abba. Hence, there should be no conflict between science and faith. They are twin aspects of one underlying quest for knowledge.
The physical laws of the universe foster increasing complexity through time. According to physicists, the process of cosmic evolution began with the Big Bang, when an extremely dense bundle of energy suddenly expanded, producing space, time, and the four fundamental forces of the universe with it.
After 370,000 years, the universe was homogeneous, a diffuse cloud of hydrogen with some helium and traces of lithium. This universe would have been quite boring, unless you really, really loved hydrogen. Fortunately, this pervasive simplicity possessed a disposition to complexity, an innate tendency to become more differentiated through time.
Stellar evolution began when gravity condensed the hydrogen, helium, and lithium into stars. The gravitational pressure of those stars fused the hydrogen, sequentially, into helium, carbon, oxygen, neon, magnesium, etc., culminating in iron. Once iron was formed, stars of a certain mass collapsed, exploding as supernovas.
These explosions produced (most of) the periodic table of elements, which began to combine in complex ways, initiating chemical evolution.
On Earth, about 3.5 billion years ago, some of these chemicals began to adapt to their environments, utilize energy for growth, and replicate themselves. Life appeared, and the process of biological evolution began.
Living organisms developed increasingly sophisticated ways of sensing their environment, becoming responsive to hot and cold, light and dark, safety and danger, prey and predator. Eventually, the process of neurological evolution produced an expansive knowledge of the environment.
But something surprising happened when organisms became aware, not only of their environment, but of themselves. Even more mysteriously, at the height of neurological evolution, organisms became aware of their awareness of themselves. The cosmic evolution that began from a unitary seed of hyper-concentrated energy has resulted in living beings who can contemplate their own existence, discern the origins of the universe, and commemorate the processes that brought them into being. Cosmic evolution has resulted in something radically new. Cosmic evolution has resulted in us.
Through emergence, the whole is other than the sum of the parts.
Paradoxically, in a universe that tends to disorder, complexity has emerged from simplicity. The concept of emergence arose in the late nineteenth century. Emergence argues that several things can combine to produce a new thing that is qualitatively different from its constituent parts. The classic example is water. Pure hydrogen at forty degrees Celsius at sea level is a flammable gas. Pure oxygen at forty degrees Celsius at sea level is a flammable gas. But if you combine them into their most stable form, you get water, which at forty degrees Celsius at sea level is a nonflammable liquid. We breathe oxygen, burn hydrogen, and drink water.
Water cannot be properly understood as the sum of oxygen and hydrogen because the properties of water are so different from those of oxygen and hydrogen. Combination is not addition; combination is transformation. For this reason, to understand water you must study water itself. Anyone trying to study water by studying oxygen and hydrogen separately, then predicting the properties of their union, would fail. Emergence is unpredictable because emergence is truly new. The whole is not only greater than the sum of the parts; the whole is other than the sum of the parts.
The human mind is an emergent property of matter. As such, it perceives beauty, which is an emergent property of the universe. At this dizzying height of evolutionary experience, a door opens into “ecstasy” or ex stasis: stepping “outside oneself ” into the teeming expanse of the cosmos. Swept into the rapture of this cosmic perspective, we gain a glimpse into the mind of Abba the Artist, into their overwhelming intelligence and excruciating patience. Most importantly, we gain a glimpse into their startling generosity, which has made the universe more beautiful than necessary—for us. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 87-89)
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For further reading, please see:
Baylis, C. A. “The Philosophic Functions of Emergence.” Philosophical Review 38 (1929) 372–84.
Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Edited by Jeffrey Robbins. New York: Basic, 2005.
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