Essays in Idleness

To our collection of mottoes from Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), author of an investigation into the quincunx, which he observed everywhere around him in The Garden of Cyrus, we must add:

“All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.”

We find this in one of the most penetrating books on “intelligent design” in nature, published outside modernity, where enquiry can be free. It approaches this topic from a direction that our contemporaries have failed to consider; that is, neither statistical nor chronological, theoretical nor empirical, but in itself, by the principle of ordination. We find it not at any beginning of any temporal series, but rather, wherever we look.

It was this Sir Thomas who said, “No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money-changer.” But everyone who claims to “follow the science” does this today.

One may see the temple of science in “the Palaces of Bees,” and in every other formation in nature — the mystical, and not “a mystery,” for it is never a mere puzzle or game.

“The finger of God” — who is not the Creator in any narrow sense — “hath left an inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms. …” We, at our best and most obedient, must use all of our faculties to partially observe what is manifestly before us.

Yet we cannot observe a creaturely God, who is no Creature, except through Jesus Christ, who can only be observed within His own Creation.  We misunderstand Him entirely when we think of Him as an industrious intervenor, thus assigning Him a role, as we would assign a servant; He does not make things as we make things. He IS, we speculate, the essence of IS-ness — “I am that I am” — and did not come to be.