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 look at the world and imagine our lives within it. Thus this class will also consider what we imagine a home to be and whether the Christian cosmology can address those concerns, as well as what resources we have to foster a new way of looking at the world. In one of the most important recent works of theological cosmology, Louis Bouyer claimed that the great benefits of the scientific worldview for humanity’s understanding of and power over the world have come at the cost of abstracting ourselves from it to some degree, and that one of the main oppositions to that abstraction has come in the form of poetry. Consequently, we will read both literary accounts of what it means to be “at home,” as well as the genre of nature writing in order to foster practices of attention to the world. The class will culminate in the work of two of the great Christian poets of recent centuries, T.S. Eliot and G.M. Hopkins, in whom we can find both practices of close attention to the world and an interpretation of that world in terms of a Christian cosmology. Thus the poetic, attentive, and theological dimensions of the class will be drawn together in what early Christians called “natural contemplation.”