by CCW | 12 September 2018 16:27
It is a wonderful phrase which acts as a recurring refrain in the first chapter of The Book of Genesis read in Chapel this week. It confronts us with certain powerful ideas and ways of thinking that contribute to our lives as students and teachers and, especially, it seems to me, in the climate of our current culture.
Creation is an orderly affair that proceeds from an intellectual principle. It is not exactly science though it provides the essential foundation for the possibilities of science in the idea that the natural world is, in principle, intelligible. Creation is really about the relation of all things to the Creator who by definition is not the same as that which is made. Creation here is about distinction and separation, itself the intellectual activity of ordering and distinguishing one thing from another. The chapter challenges our assumptions about time and our literal ways of thinking. After all, what does it mean to speak of light or one day or a second or a third day before the Sun and the Moon were created on the fourth day? It is more about the intellectual order of reality.
“God is the beginning and end of all things especially rational creatures”Thomas Aquinas notes. “The Originator of heaven and earth,”the Qur’an states,“when he decrees a thing, he says ‘Be’ and it is.” Such ways of thinking reflect the opening chapter of Genesis as informed, too, by the Prologue to John’s Gospel about the Logos or Word of God, the intellectual principle through which all things are intelligible. All this, we might say,is the great gift of the Jews. It is the idea of beginning, not with chaos or the sexual congress of divine beings, but with God.
Like modern science, Genesis utterly discounts the idea of the divinity of nature or of natural bodies, especially the idea of the heavenly bodies as gods. Humans, left to their own devices, default to the worship of nature, attributing supernatural powers to natural forces. Like modern science, too, Genesis argues for the distinctions between different things in the created world. Darwin’s great work is entitled “The Origin of Species,” implying the same idea that things are distinct from one another.
But the recurring refrain that God “saw that it was good” highlights another important feature of the opening chapter of Genesis and one that speaks profoundly to our world and day. The idea that the world is good and that everything in the world is good is profoundly freeing. It opens us out to wonder and delight rather than fear and uncertainty. It changes how we think about evil.
In 1947, just after the end of the devastations of the Second World War, the poet, W.H. Auden wrote a long poem entitled “The Age of Anxiety”. That title, more than the poem itself, caught people’s attention and has become a kind of descriptive term for our contemporary world. We live, it seems, in a culture of anxiety. We hear about anxiety all the time, especially in relation to high school and university students.
What is anxiety and what is the antidote? Jesus in the Gospel tells us three times “be not anxious” while offering the antidote to our anxieties that reflects precisely the wisdom of Genesis. The phrase in Matthew’s Gospel was first translated by Tyndale as “be not careful,” which seems strange. Are we to be careless? No. A moment’s reflection reveals the insight. It means do not befull of cares. Our anxieties are our cares and worries, our fears and uncertainties about ourselves and our world; in short our worldly preoccupations. The King James Version changed it to an equally intriguing phrase, “take no thought”, suggesting, profoundly, that our anxieties are rooted in how we think about things. In the late 19th century, reflecting the influence of the psychology and philosophy of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud, it was changed to “be not anxious.” Angst R’ us in the age of anxiety.
Nothing adds more to anxiety than talking about it but the antidote is found in how we think about the world around us. Genesis counters from the get-go a kind of dualism which infects our culture, a kind of fearfulness about the world. Such is a forgetting of the essential goodness of the created world because it is the product of God. God is the cause not only of the being of things but their essential goodness. To be reminded of this is the antidote to our anxieties.
“Be not anxious,”Jesus says, bidding us to “behold the fowls of the air”, “consider the lilies of the field”, and above all, “seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.” Such strong verbs recall the opening chapter of Genesis. Creation is an orderly affair and creation is good because it is the effect of a good Creator. There is something right or good about each aspect of the created world.
Our reading of the work of the second through to the fifth day of creation is complemented by a reading from another much later work. Like Genesis 1 it is a kind of litany, an orderly sequence of prayers and praises. Known liturgically as the Benedicite, Omni Opera, the Latin for the opening phrase, “O all ye works of the Lord, Bless ye the Lord,” it comes from a text known as The Song of the Three Children, an addition to the canonical Book of Daniel. It reflects the orderly nature of Genesis 1 and presents the intriguing and powerful idea of the whole of nature existing for the purpose of the praise of God; the Creator is praised by each aspect of creation in its own truth and being. The section of the Benediciteread in Chapel ended with the phrase“O ye Children of Men, Bless ye the Lord, Praise Him and Magnify Him for ever”, pointing to the vocation of our humanity. We give articulate voice to creation’s praise of God as Creator. This counters our exploitive and instrumental manipulation of nature as if the world were just there for our use and, of course, abuse.
The context of this song of praise is instructive. The three children are the victims of religious persecution but remain faithful to their Hebrew conviction about the truth of God. Nebuchadnezzar, the king who demands that he be worshipped, has thrown them into a fiery furnace as punishment for their refusal to bow down to him. Instead of whining and complaining or screaming in pain, they sing the praises of God and in a way that recalls the whole order of creation as laid out in Genesis 1.
Such is our human vocation and freedom: to sing the praises of God in creation is to take delight in the goodness of what God has made. We are recalled to God’s providential care and goodness of his creation even in the face of human presumption and evil. We lift our eyes to “behold, consider, and seek” what God seeks and wants for us, for “God saw that it was good.”
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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