"And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good..."
+Genesis 1:31 KJV
"All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men."
+ John 1:3-4 KJV
Fr Alexander Schmemann on the liturgical sacramental approach to matter and creation:
"Each ounce of matter belongs to God and is to find in God its fulfillment. Each instant of time is God’s time and is to fulfill itself as God’s eternity. Nothing is "neutral.” For the Holy Spirit, as a ray of light, as a smile of joy, has "touched” all things, all time—revealing all of them as precious stones of a precious temple."
+ Fr Alexander Schmemann, For Life of the World, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition (Crestwood: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973) 76.
"The term "sacramental” means here that the basic and primordial intuition which not only expresses itself in worship, but of which the entire worship is indeed the "phenomenon”—both effect and experience—is that the world, be it in its totality as cosmos, or in its life and becoming as time and history, is an epiphany of God, a means of His revelation, presence, and power. In other words, it not only "posits” the idea of God as a rationally acceptable cause of its existence, but truly "speaks” of Him and is in itself an essential means both of knowledge of God and communion with Him, and to be so is its true nature and its ultimate destiny. But then worship is truly an essential act, and man an essentially worshipping being, for it is only in worship that man has the source and the possibility of that knowledge which is communion, and of that communion which fulfills itself as true knowledge: knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world—communion with God and therefore communion with all that exists. Thus the very notion of worship is based on an intuition and experience of the world as an "epiphany” of God, thus the world—in worship—is revealed in its true nature and vocation as "sacrament.”"
+ Fr Alexander Schmemann, For Life of the World, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition (Crestwood: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973) 120.
"God is not spatially somewhere else, acting upon the universe from without. Rather it is within this world, this material universe, that God does indeed act, energetically...
...this revelatory activity is transformative, and in a very dramatic manner: that which is not God becomes imbued with his properties, as the red-hot iron sword. Material reality is not an obstacle to the revelation or knowledge of God, but is rather the very means and medium of that revelation, and this is at the same time an act of communion or an exchange of properties...
...early Christians were prepared to see God throughout all creation: the shape of birds with their wings outstretched, the form of the human face with its horizontal axis of the eyes and vertical axis of the nose, and even the banners lifted up by the Roman army, all these, they said, show how the power of the cross is manifest in all created reality, for the cross, they claimed, is the axis, which stands eternally still, while the world rotates around it. This might strike us as rather fanciful, but it does bear witness to the dynamic manner in which the revelation of God in Christ creates a world reflecting himself."
+ Fr John Behr, "Is God Wholly Separate from the Material Universe?"
Fr Maxym in an excerpt of a talk entitled "Orthodoxy and the World"
"The world in the Orthodox understanding is a gift. In the last century a well know Orthodox theologian, Fr Dumitru Staniloae wrote very much on this theme that the world is a gift of God and that this gift invites a response from us. It doesn't demand a response but it invites a response from us. The world in this sense is given to us as a workshop, an "atelier," a workshop given to us, that we might use, and use wisely for the deification, for our own deification and of course the transformation of the world."
+ Fr Maxym Lysack, Orthodoxy and the World
And David Bentley Hart on the subtle 'modernist' (and modern fundamentalist) shift towards desacralization and second storey presuppositions:
"...the loss of the larger sense of an integral unity of metaphysical and physical causes, and of a spiritual rationality wholly pervading and sustaining the universe— a loss that occurred at a subtler, more tacit, more unconscious level—opened an imaginative chasm between the premodern and modern worlds. Human beings now in a sense inhabited a universe different from that inhabited by their ancestors.
In the older model, the whole cosmos—its splendor, its magnificent order, its ever vaster profundities— had been a kind of theophany, a manifestation of the transcendent God within the very depths and heights of creation. All of reality participated in those transcendental perfections that had their infinite consummation in God and that came to utterance in us, in our rational contemplation and coherent articulation and artistic celebration of the beauty and grandeur of existence. The human wakefulness to the mystery of being was thus also already an openness to the divine, because the world was an image of and participation in the God who is the wellspring of all being.
Again, and emphatically, this was a vision of creations rational order immeasurably remote from the Deist’s or Intelligent Design theorist’s notion of the world as a wonderful machine, designed and fabricated by a particularly enterprising superhuman intellect. To see the cosmos as wholly pervaded, unified, and sustained by a divine intellectual power, at once transcendent and immanent (logos or nous or, casting a glance eastward, dharma or tao), reaching down to the barest possibilities of things and rising up to the highest actuality, is not at all to see the cosmos merely as an artifact, constructed from disparate parts by some kind of very resourceful mind but itself mindless and mechanical, with even its beauty and mystery reduced to only so many arbitrary decorative effects. In the former case, one sees creation as a reflection of Gods nature, open to transcendence from within; in the latter case, one sees the world as a reflection only of divine power, and as closed in upon itself."
+ David Bentley Hart, "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) 58-59.
And finally, paraphrasing an Orthodox Priest in Toronto speaking on the Feast of Theophany:
"One could say that we Orthodox are the biggest proponents of the material world, we bless everything, and perhaps when 'matter' is understood as it is in the Church, we are 'materialists' par excellence"
