24 July 2024

When I was a student, I read all the books written by the Orthodox priest, Anthony Bloom. One of the things I liked about his writing was his desire to get back to first principles. I noticed he liked to drill down into the basic meaning of certain words.

In one of his books, he talked about humus and its relationship with humility. In order to be effective ministers and priests, we have to be like the humus which offers fertile soil for growth. The route to this provision is through the humility of Christ, trampled down like soil and open to all the elements, sun, wind and rain!

The other day, I was reading his TS Eliot lectures on ‘Beauty and Meaning’. At one point he was talking about God not bringing order out of chaos but bringing the cosmos out of chaos. At this point, he drilled down into the basic meaning of cosmos.

He connected it to the word ‘cosmetic’. Apparently, they are both from the same root. Bloom says it means ‘creating beauty’.  This is a lovely thought. When people put on cosmetics, they are participating in an act of creation. Although, it has to be said, some are better at creating than others!

In the creation of the cosmos, God was creating beauty which is sometimes difficult for us to see. As Bloom says, this is ‘not a beauty according to our own task, not a beauty according to our own presuppositions, but a beauty which will be a revelation to us of what are the potentialities of this cosmos’.

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