I’m always fascinated by what physical creation — or, as St. Gregory of Nyssa categorizes it, the sensible created realm — is trying to communicate to us and why it has the form, dimensions, spatiality, dynamics, and materials it has as opposed to other possible alternatives. Why are we limited by time and space, and why did God decide that these constraints should exist?

Many of the Church fathers and later Christian theologians took for granted the four elements that Empedocles identified as the fundamental components of the cosmos: earth, water, air, and fire. In St. John of Damascus’ ‘Philosophical Chapters,’ he writes, “In general, an element is that first thing from which something is made and to which it is ultimately reducible. In particular, however, an element is that of which a body is made and to which it is reducible — and such are fire, water, air, and earth.”[i] And St. Gregory Palamas tells us in the 14^th century that “the four elements out of which the world is fashioned balance one another equally, and that each of the elements has its own sphere, the size of which is proportionate to its density, as Aristotle also thinks.”[ii]

Although this relatively simplistic model has been supplanted by much more complex taxonomies in modern science, they still retain an observable foundational structure that — in the writings of many of the fathers — reveals an eternal truth that answers different questions than those that factual truths might satisfy. They help us contemplate the mysterious when science has dulled us to the mystery of the “natural” world through its materialistic explanations that, although helpful in many important ways, demystify the disturbing peculiarity of existence. The fathers help draw us back to this wonder.