Creation’s greatest natural beauty
Canon Michael Hull, our Assistant Priest, writes:
Humanity is creation’s greatest natural beauty. Human beings are created in God’s image and likeness and are substantially different from other creatures, even the angels because with the Incarnation angels worship a true-human in Jesus (Gen. 1.26–31; 5.1–3; 9.6; Hebrews 1; Jn 10.34), albeit also true-God. Not only are we God’s greatest beauty in the mystery of creation, but we are also endowed with rational souls to know the transcendentals (truth, goodness and beauty) in natural and divine revelation. Our appreciation lends itself to crafting beautiful things and appreciating them, for example, a concerto by Bach, a painting by van Gogh, a building by Gaudí. When we fashion such things, we act in accord with God’s plan for the created order.
Since human beings have too often abused the created order, it may seem as if there is an adversarial relationship between humanity and nature and between the good things that we make in concert with the good things that God has made for us. Natural beauty is given to us by God in animals, plants and stones. Advances in technology have enabled us to understand more deeply than ever before organic and inorganic matter in terms of their interior and exterior orderings, complexities and diversities. Living and non-living things, in God’s design, are wonderful. ‘I will praise thee’, sings the Psalmist to God, ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well’ (139.14)
Humans are sub-creators to a certain extent—J.R.R. Tolkien once referred to us as ‘little makers’—in the beautiful things we craft and our awe at God’s omnipresence in all things. Yes, beavers build dams out of God-given instinct, but we build things like the Webb Space Telescope because of our rationality and marvel. Bach, in employing animal-gut strings for the lautenwerck (lute-harpsichord), van Gogh in mixing dye from plants for his paint, and Gaudí, in utilising quarried stone for his buildings, fostered the beauty of creation.
Yet the balance is tricky: many others abused animals, plants and inanimate things.
We find an archetypical presentation of the transcendentals in the Book of Genesis (3.6): when humanity saw ‘that the tree was good for food [goodness], and that it was pleasant to the eyes [beauty], and a tree to be desired to make one wise [truth]’, we sinned by violating God’s command not to eat of it. To put it another way, our use of the created order is all about our obedience to God, who gave us creation for us to use so as to flourish, not to misuse so as to disobey God. Part-and-parcel of our flourishing is making things in imitation of and with the gifts provided by our Maker, namely, our rational souls and the fruits of the earth from which spring music, art and architecture, just to name a few of humanity’s beautiful accomplishments.
In writing to the Ephesians (2.10). St Paul notes the importance of our ‘handiwork’ (poiēma). The word is also used in the Septuagint for ‘creation’ (Ps. 9.14; 14.25; cf. Rom. 1.20). Insofar as Paul reminds the Ephesians they were chosen from the foundation of the world (Eph. 1.4), Paul is linking them—and you and me—to a new creation, already begun with the Incarnation (Gal. 6.15; 2 Cor 5.17). On the one hand, he ties it to the good works we are called to do as a consequence of our life in Christ, for example, we labour alongside our Lord in building his kingdom as Paul says eloquently when he describes himself and the earliest Christians as ‘God’s fellow workers’ (1 Cor 3.9). On the other hand, it underscores that creation in the first instance, and now God’s new creation in Christ willed by God from all time, exposes humanity as ‘the glory of God’, ‘the vision of God’ (see St Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies 4.20; cf. Wis. 3.5). Fully alive in Christ, we generate beautiful things from nature and to put those things to their ultimate end: to glorify God. Within the divine liturgy, aided by sacred art and architecture, particularly in a Season of Creation, we have a foretaste of the beatific vision for which we are destined. As the Psalmist sings, ‘One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple’ (27.4).
In the beginning, ‘God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good’ (Gen. 1.31). We, God’s creatures long for our creator, who calls, nay, commands us to imitate him in creating good things, beautiful things, to reflect God’s beauty and our own.
The Reverend Canon Professor Michael Hull has been an Assistant Priest at St Vincent’s since 2015. He is also the Principal of the Scottish Episcopal Institute.
