COSMOS // AD 640

 

The veil opened and St Maximus attended. As he watched the Divine Liturgy unfold, the symbols were transparent to him: 

The liturgical chants represented joy spilling over from hearts made pure. The invocations of peace captured the ascetic struggle in every part of life. The Lord's prayer recalled the parishioner's adoption into Sonship through Christ. The final chant, "One is Holy", embodied the movement of the entire cosmos pressing into the infinity of divine union. 

Liturgy was the point of synthesis. The spiritual united itself to the physical: the Word made flesh was made again to inhabit matter by participation in the holy rites; the gradual incarnation enveloping the world by degree. It was only through liturgy that all the cosmos would be drawn together into Christ's Mystical Body.

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Yet even as he left the nave each day, he saw liturgical movement continue. The birds hymned their Creator every morning with this same joy. Creatures everywhere struggled in labor against the wiles of death, bearing in themselves the same ascetic call. Whole forests gathered together with glory clouds of leaves reaching up to the heavens and wooden roots driving deep into earth- marrying heaven and earth in themselves as Christ did in His Person. Then there was the heavenly iconostasis, of angelic stars moving in cycles around two great lights: the moon as Holy Mother whose light was a shelter from the night; and nature's icon of Christ set in the heavens, the glorious sun whose light gave color and warmth and life to the world, sustaining all things. The Confessor was aware that another liturgy was taking place all around him, a liturgy in which the cosmos itself participated to unite to Christ just as He had to mankind.

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Uniting the whole cosmos to God is the ultimate fulfillment of Christ's words: "For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only One...that the cosmos might be saved through Him." It is this same love of God that extends toward man, through him, and out toward the whole cosmos, that all of creation might continue in the cosmic liturgy without end.

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 John 3:16 is transliterated: "Houtōs gar ēgapēsen ho Theos ton kosmon For God so loved the cosmos" There is no Greek word for "world" besides "kosmon", cosmos.