“Referring to the burning bush seen by Moses, and perhaps also obliquely invoking Heraclitus and the Stoics, St. Maximos says that “the unspeakable and prodigious fire hidden in the essence of things, as in the bush, is the fire of divine love and the dazzling brilliance of his beauty inside every thing.” The logoi of created things, the presence of the invisible within them, is at the same time their hidden beauty that can be apprehended by noetic vision.
“It is not by accident that the Septuagint Greek text of Genesis I uses kalon rather than agatho ̄n to render the Hebrew, which itself contains both meanings: After each act of creation, the Creator saw that it was beautiful. The beautiful, then, is “a shining forth, an epiphany, of the mysterious depths of being”—the visible illuminated by the invisible. Sacraments, icons, liturgies, and the lived experience of God in nature all manifest the kosmos noe ̄ tos through the kosmos aisthetos.
All are part of the shared redemption of humanity and nature through the disclosure of divine beauty. It is this vision, not a private predilection nor an effete aestheticism, that Dostoevsky expresses when he writes, in his sketchbook, that “beauty will save the world.”
- Bruce Foltz, the Noetics of Nature
The first one is by yours truly - and, true story, drawn in my very own blood !
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