Cosmos From Chaos

I have forgotten much from the intensity of seminary and the quiet years after. I lament the loss, and I can’t help but feel that my current career speeds the process. I do not feel like the theological thinker I was while working on my creative writing after seminary. But hopefully it’s just a widow’s mite in the the Spirit’s development of my endurance.

In any case, one idea that was brought back to me recently is how creating something beautiful necessarily glorifies God. Among what seems like many other things, I believed this and forgot it.

Madeleine L’Engle comes to mind with her cosmos from chaos concept. God, as creator, takes from the waters of chaos and fashions the earth. Such are all creative acts, and in their likeness to the Creator, they honor him. As L'Engle says, there is no “Christian” art. But there is good art—cosmos from chaos art—and good art is inherently Christian. Even when it doesn’t do so consicously or even willingly, good art imitates the creator. Tolkien called it subcreation.

Good art, then, is art that fashions cosmos from chaos.

What about beauty? Is good art necessary beautiful? Are beauty and goodness the same thing? Or perhaps do they just correlate so closely that you can’t have one without the other? What is beauty?

I don’t have an answer to that yet. Hopefully I will remember to spend the time thinking about it later on.