COSMOLOGY

COSMOLOGY. Literally, this word means the study or rationale of the universe and, in Christian thought, the theology or meaning of the universe as created by God (q.v.). The distinctions implied in the halves of the preceding sentence provide the key to much debate in the early Church. Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophy of the era of the Church Fathers (qq.v.), did see the universe as a kind of theophany (q.v.), but a theophany tied to divinity by impersonal chains of causal necessity. Gnosticism (q.v.), on the other hand, argued that the physical world was entirely unrelated to the good and true God and instead the product of evil forces. Clement and Origen of Alexandria (qq.v.) were among the earliest writers to attempt to find a Christian expression for the world as, on the one hand, the product of a personal Creator, and on the other, consistent with the best insight of the pagan philosophers. Their attempts to accomplish this double task were flawed in ways that contributed to the controversies of the 4th c. and following, over the divinity of Christ and the Trinity (q.v.). The later work of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor (qq.v.) built on the foundations laid by the two Alexandrians. The corrections that Gregory and Maximus applied lay chiefly in their reevaluation of change (kinesis), and in their rooting of universal meaning in the Incarnate Word. The universe, in short, finds the fulfillment of its being and movement in Christ. The latter is the end or goal (telos) for which God made the invisible (angelic) and visible worlds. This adjustment of Origen’s position, which considered material existence a temporary expedient provided for fallen spirits by God’s mercy (see Apocatastasis), owed much to Irenaeus’s (q.v.) idea of “recapitulation,” i.e., the re-creation or renewing of humanity and the world in Christ. The cosmology of the Orthodox Church, evident in both its liturgy and its formal theology (q.v.), is the result of this reworking.