David Bentley Hart: Changeless Beauty

Cover via Amazon

Creation, says Gregory [of Nyssa], is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God, the true, primordial, archetypal music, in which human nature can glimpse itself as in a mirror.  We are music moved to music; finitude is not a condition of violence, a wounding of the universal syncopated by the holocaust of the particular; and so there is no ontological warrant for violence, only a causal one, an aberrant series, born of a perverse desire, turned from the light of the infinite toward nothingness - which determines nothing.  Creation is, as its first word, a partaking in the inexhaustible goodness of God; and its ceaseless flow of light and shadow, constancy and change, mirrors both the "music" of God's ordering words and the incomprehensibility of his changeless nature, while the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God's glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite.

--David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite