From Nature to Creation by Norman Wirzba

Author:Norman Wirzba [Wirzba, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL067000, REL067070, Creation—Biblical teaching, Nature—Religious aspects—Christianity, Ecotheology, Human ecology—Religious aspects—Christianity
ISBN: 9781493400089
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Disciplined Perception

What remains for us to consider is how we today, living in a world marred by the effects of idolatry, can develop the perceptive capacities to see creation properly. How are our doors of perception to be cleansed so that when we see a creature we see it as the material manifestation of God’s wisdom and love? What changes in the manner of our living need to occur before we can get into a position to apprehend what God wants us to sense?

In answering these questions we have much to learn from iconographic and monastic traditions, because they are so resolutely focused on the purification of perception. Recall that an icon is not about representing the world to us as it now is. It is, rather, about helping us see each thing in terms of its transfiguration in Christ. To see another as already participating in and enjoying God’s loving presence requires that idolatrous ways of seeing that would reduce others to our desires and expectation have been overcome. For this reason Pavel Florensky argued that only saints can paint icons because they have undergone, and continue to undergo, a process of transformation in which, as Paul says in Galatians 2:20, it is no longer they who live but Christ who lives in and through them. The name for this kind of transformation is asceticism: “The ascetic purification of the soul, the removal from it of every subjective and accidental trace, reveals to the ascetic the rediscovered truth of human nature—the eternal truth of that creature created on the model of Christ, and therefore on the absolute model.”49 Throughout his writings Florensky maintained that the beauty of this world can be properly described only as God’s love for the world. For us to see this beauty we must ourselves participate in this love. “In love and in love alone is real knowledge of the Truth conceivable.”50 In other words, unless one undergoes the metanoia (Greek: change of heart and direction) and purification that make Christlike love effective in one’s body and being, one will not be able to see another as God’s creature.51

Asceticism is the path that leads us in this Christlike way. But asceticism, as reflected in various practices of renunciation like celibacy, fasting, and weeping, is often mischaracterized as hatred of the body and of material things. This is most unfortunate, because what asceticism is ultimately about is the correction of the chaotic desire and moral disorder within us so that we can perceive and welcome the world as God does. Asceticism is the discipline and art that, at its best, enables us to contemplate the beauty that radiates throughout creation. As such, asceticism is the prelude to true perception. Or as Florensky put it, “the aim to which the ascetic aspires is to perceive every creature in its first-created, victorious beauty. The Holy Spirit reveals Himself in the ability to see the beauty of creation. To always see the beauty in everything would mean ‘to resurrect

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