'Lost in the Cosmos': What Is 'Our Common Home'?

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

From the early Church until today, Christians have had the experience of not being quite at home in the world, of not being able to attain genuine happiness here, of orienting their lives towards something that goes beyond this world. Apologists like C.S. Lewis recognized that this has been one of Christianity's most powerful claims in an age of widespread materialism and religious indifference: we are not limited to what we are able to experience in this world; we are, in fact, pilgrims. Yet Christianity makes this claim within its broader message that, on the one hand, this world is the good creation of a good God and, on the other, human destiny is not a disembodied heaven but a bodily resurrection into a new heaven and earth. In that sense, we are not just travelers passing through the cosmos: we were made for this world, and it was made for us. This cosmic perspective implies that the world is indeed our home, and it has profound importance for how we think about liturgy, the environment, and all the dimensions of Christian life. In this class, we will explore the foundations of Christian cosmology and consider its implications for Christian life and thought today. We will study the Church's first major doctrinal conflict, the Gnostic Controversy, which was not primarily about Christ or the Trinity, but about whether salvation means an escape from the world or the redemption of the world. From there, we'll trace the great debates provoked by Origen of Alexandria's theology, which were among other things a struggle over what kind of Scriptural and Christological cosmology could do justice to the Church's commitment to the fundamental goodness of creation. To conclude, we'll consider some of the consequences of these cosmological visions with regard to feasting and fasting, marriage and celibacy, stability and transience, wonder and contemplation, and angels and demons, looking especially at the liturgical theology of Pope Benedict and the environmentalism of Pope Francis. Readings may be drawn from the Bible, Irenaeus of Lyons, Origen of Alexandria, Evagrius of Pontus, Theophilus of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Maximus the Confessor, Louis Bouyer, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, Wendell Berry, G.K. Chesterton, Josef Pieper, Teilhard de Chardin, and others.