Material Creation, the Crown of Creation and Storm Clouds on the Horizon
Fr. John Riccardo
June 30, 2021
We are continuing in these summer weeks a series of excerpts from our latest publication, The Christian Cosmic Narrative: The Deep History of the World. Today, we see the goodness of the material world and most especially of man and woman, the crowning of God’s creation, made in His own image and likeness, made for each other, and given dominion over the earth. We also get, however, deeper insight into the hatred and agenda of the enemy for our first parents and indeed for us. May the Lord help us to be good stewards of His creation, and let us be on guard against the one who prowls like a roaring lion, seeking to enslave and degrade us.
“The fertility of God’s creative thought was not ended with the creation of the angels. God went on to establish the second part of his creation, the material world. Unlike the angelic spiritual beings, who shared with God a mind and a will that could reason, decide, and love, the visible creation was to express by its variety and its extent a glimpse of the power and the beauty of the Divine Personality who brought it into being.
“The material world was tied to the qualities of time and space, qualities that would both limit its operations and provide much of its beauty. Time itself began, and with it the possibility of length of years, of change, and of slowly maturing development. Space was created, allowing vast reaches of expanse within which the material world would take form. God then brought forth matter and energy, light and force. He strung out glittering galaxies and set bright stars in place; he created planets and comets and all the splendors of deep space, whose extent was so great as to seem infinite, and whose age was such as almost to defy a beginning to its time. He put the whole of this material creation into movement, its massive complex bodies as well as its microscopic particles, all whirling at different speeds and in various orbits and patterns. The angels marveled to see this new form of creation and sang for joy at its beauty and its magnificence...
“[The angels] “saw that God was creating a cosmos, a patterned and purposeful universe out of what would otherwise have been a chaos without sense or significance. They saw that there was a meaning to this time-bound creation, that the coming of time meant a drama of change, the unfolding of a story, and they waited eagerly to see what the passage of time would bring about.
“Eventually their attention became riveted on one small planet circling one small star, in one of the numberless galaxies spinning through space. By a rare combination of carefully ordered conditions, on this tiny bit of rock called the Earth, God added a new and mysterious quality to his material creation: he brought forth the mystery of organic life. Using the stuff of the inert material world, he fashioned through the long years ever more complex forms of life, combinations of matter that contained first an intrinsic principle of growth, then of sense, then of movement, then of emotive feeling, and finally even to the stirrings of unconscious thought. Plant life, animals, fish, birds, living things of an almost infinite variety came forth from the divine mind.
“God looked at all that he had created, and he saw that it was good. The angels realized that all of material creation was moving toward a final culmination, and they understood that a new and momentous chapter in God’s unfolding story was soon to come about.
“God guided his creation to its crown: he brought about a new kind of being, the human. These new creatures were a wonder to the angels looking on. The angels marveled first at their composite nature, at the way they summed up and united everything God had made. Fashioned from the ‘dust of the earth,’ they shared with lifeless matter the basic elements of its composition, its context of time and space, and its materiality. With living things they shared the quality of organic life: growth and generation, movement and sense. Most astonishingly they were given immortal souls and were gifted with minds and free wills like the angels. They were the very image of God wrought upon lowly matter, a microcosm of all creation, a small but complete universe, who in their union of body and soul, of materiality and spirit, summed up all the varied aspects of God’s creative design.
“God said to these humans: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’ (Gen. 1:28). Unlike the angels, whose creation was immediate and entire, each separate from the other, humanity was created in two forms, male and female, who together expressed the fullness of human nature. The man was designed with the woman in view, and the woman was made with the man in mind. Again unlike the angels, the race of humans was to grow through the medium of time, and all who shared their nature were to come from this one original pair. This meant that humans were given a communal identity that was different from that of the angels; the whole human race was prefigured and in a sense present in these first two members of the race...They were then given the joyful task and privilege of participating in God’s creative action. They were to unite with each other, physically and in a loving union of souls, and were to fill the earth with the children of their union. The angels were amazed at the high dignity God was conferring on these creatures of time and sense, whose quality of individual personality embedded in communal unity echoed the inner life of the Trinity, and whose generative potency was a participation in God’s creative love.
“God further dignified the humans by appointing them stewards of a portion of material creation. Just as he had brought order out of chaos, so humanity was to bring the beauty and harmony of God’s order to a world in a still unfinished state...They lived in joy, at peace in the presence of God, in harmony with themselves, in tune with the material creation they were assigned to govern, eager for the task they had been given, and delighting in one another.
“In the creation of the man and the woman, a principle deep in the mind of God was expressed, a dynamic of love and self-gift at the heart of the Trinity. The lowest would become the highest; the least would be made the greatest; the last would be the first. In the human, the lowliest aspects of creation would be raised to a height equal to the angelic beings. The angels of heaven delighted in the high place being offered to these lesser creatures and were content to enjoy and echo the love of their Creator reflected in this unexpected way.
“But the sight of these happy creatures filled the Devil and his fallen angels with anger and envy. They took thought as to how they might mar God’s work and destroy the destiny of this newly created race. They set about to enslave those whom they had been meant to serve and to degrade those who had been assigned such an exalted place into the lowly slime beneath their feet.”