Nature, Poetry, and Science

The luminous, world-affirming side of St. Porphyrios’s teaching: his conviction that beauty, the created world, poetry, and even science are ways to God. For him the whole of nature is a “secret Gospel”; the creatures — plants, animals, birds, mountains, the sea, the sunset, the starry sky — are “little loves” through which the soul attains to the great Love that is Christ; and “to become a Christian one must become a poet,” for Christ does not want insensitive souls. Rooted in his lifelong love of growing things and his openness to all learning, this is the outward face of his teaching that the soul reaches God not by recoiling from the world but by loving it rightly, as full of God.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

Creation as a Secret Gospel

St. Porphyrios loved the created world with an intensity that is one of the most distinctive notes of his teaching, and he saw in it not a distraction from God but a road to Him. Nature, for St. Porphyrios, is a “secret Gospel” — a revelation of God parallel to Scripture, in which the soul that has learned to see can read the love and the wisdom of the Creator (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “Nature”; widely circulated as “Nature is a secret Gospel”). This is the ancient patristic doctrine of the “two books” — the book of Scripture and the book of creation — but in St. Porphyrios it is charged with his particular warmth, less a theological proposition than a lover’s delight.

The whole creation, in his teaching, is shot through with the love of God: “All things around us are droplets of the love of God — both things animate and inanimate, the plants and the animals, the birds and the mountains, the sea and the sunset and the starry sky. They are little loves through which we attain to the great Love that is Christ” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “The love of God in creation”). This is the metaphysics beneath all his nature-teaching: created things are not idols to be feared nor mere matter to be used, but little loves — sacramental signs of the one great Love — and the soul that loves them rightly is led by them to their Source. He did not teach renunciation of the world’s beauty; he taught its right enjoyment, as a means to Christ.

Flowers, Birdsong, and the Beauty of Things

St. Porphyrios’s love of creation was concrete and tender, not abstract. He spoke especially of flowers: “Flowers… teach us with their fragrance and with their magnificence. They speak to us of the love of God. They scatter their fragrance and their beauty on sinners and on the righteous” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Flowers”). The detail — that the flower’s beauty falls on sinner and righteous alike — is deliberate: it images the indiscriminate generosity of God, who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45). The flower is a little gospel of grace.

He was famously moved by birdsong, and the much-repeated account of St. Porphyrios and the nightingale — the hidden bird singing its heart out in the wilderness for no audience but God, an image of the soul that pours itself out in love unseen — became, in the retellings, a parable of his whole spirituality (the nightingale account, drawn from Wounded by Love and circulated widely, e.g., orthodoxcityhermit.com). His delight in the sea, the mountains, the sunset, and the night sky runs all through the book. This was not aestheticism; it was worship. He looked at a flower or listened to a bird and his heart went straight to Christ.

The Soul of a Poet

From this flows one of his most quoted and most surprising teachings: that the Christian must become a poet. “Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet,” he said; and again, “For a person to become a Christian he must have a poetic soul. He must become a poet. Christ does not wish insensitive souls in His company” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “The poetic soul”). He did not mean that one must write verse. He meant that Christianity requires a soul that is refined, sensitive, awake to beauty, capable of love and wonder — the opposite of the coarse, calculating, insensitive soul. “The soul of the Christian needs to be refined and sensitive, to have sensibility and wings” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love).

This is deeply connected to his core teaching of love. The poetic soul is the soul capable of being wounded by love — of seeing the little loves in creation and being drawn through them to the great Love. An insensitive soul cannot fall in love with Christ, because it cannot fall in love with anything; it is closed to the beauty through which God draws souls. Hence the cultivation of sensibility, wonder, and the appreciation of beauty is, for St. Porphyrios, not a luxury added to the Christian life but a prerequisite of it. To deaden the soul to beauty is to deaden it to God.

Science and Learning as Windows on God

Strikingly, St. Porphyrios — the man with two years of schooling — extended this openness to science and learning. Far from setting faith against knowledge, he regarded the study of the created world, including the sciences, as another window onto the wisdom of God, and he was reportedly eager to hear about scientific discoveries, astronomy, and the workings of nature, finding in them fresh occasions for wonder at the Creator (Wounded by Love, “Knowledge and science”; Saint Porphyrios: A Saint for Our Times, fatherlywords.com, on his openness to science and modern knowledge). For St. Porphyrios there was no war between the secret Gospel of nature and the human effort to understand it; the more one knew of the wonders of creation, the more there was to wonder at, and the more reason to love their Author. This openness is of a piece with the Church and World posture treated in the orthodoxy guide (see Church and World): the world, its beauty, and even its science are not the enemy of the Gospel but, rightly received, its allies.

The Patristic Roots of His Nature-Mysticism

St. Porphyrios’s love of creation, for all its personal warmth, is not a private romanticism but a flowering of an ancient Orthodox theological tradition, and it is worth naming the roots so that his teaching is not mistaken for mere nature-sentiment. The Fathers taught the doctrine of the logoi: that every created thing has within it a logos, a divine word or principle, by which it was made and through which it speaks of its Creator — so that the whole cosmos is a vast theophany, a showing-forth of God, for those with eyes to see (the doctrine is given its fullest development in St. Maximus the Confessor; on the wider tradition, see the Church’s teaching on creation). The “two books” — Scripture and creation — are the patristic background of St. Porphyrios’s “nature is a secret Gospel.” And the tradition of seeing the natural creation as the garment or the icon of God, scattered with signs of His love, runs from the Psalms (“The heavens declare the glory of God,” Psalm 18/19:1) through the Fathers to the hymnography of the Church.

What St. Porphyrios adds is not new doctrine but a particular intensity and immediacy of vision. The Fathers taught the logoi; St. Porphyrios seems simply to have seen them — to have looked at a flower or heard a nightingale and gone straight through it to the love of God, without effort, as a matter of immediate perception. This is the nature-mysticism of a man whose charism of diorasis (see Accounts of Clairvoyance) extended, it seems, to the spiritual depth of created things: he perceived the love of God in creation the way he perceived the state of a soul in confession — directly, by grace. His teaching invites the rest of us, who do not see so immediately, to cultivate the vision: to slow down, to attend, to let the beauty of the world do its work of drawing the heart to God. This cultivation of perception is exactly what he meant by acquiring “the soul of a poet.”

The World Loved Rightly

The thread that ties together flowers and poetry and science is St. Porphyrios’s conviction that the soul reaches God not by recoiling from the world but by loving it rightly, as full of God. This distinguishes him from any world-denying caricature of Orthodox asceticism. The same man who practiced extreme ascesis at Kavsokalyvia loved the soil, the trees he planted at Kallisia, the flowers, the birds, the stars, and the discoveries of science — and saw God in all of them. The ascetic renunciation and the joyful love of creation were, for him, not in tension: he renounced the world as an idol precisely so that he could love it as a gift — as a scatter of little loves leading to the great Love. This is the joy that pervades his teaching, and it is inseparable from his counsel on raising children, whom he wished to see grow up in exactly this atmosphere of beauty, wonder, and love rather than of fear (see The Education of Children).

See Also

References

  • Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. “Nature is a secret Gospel”; the creatures as “little loves” leading to the great Love; flowers that teach of God’s love; “whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet”; the soul that must be “refined and sensitive… with wings”; his openness to knowledge and science.
  • Saint Porphyrios: A Saint for Our Times. fatherlywords.com (Knowing Orthodoxy). On his openness to science, learning, and the modern world as windows on God.
  • “St. Porphyrios and a Nightingale.” orthodoxcityhermit.com. The nightingale account, drawn from Wounded by Love.
  • “A Christian Must Become a Poet (Saint Porphyrios).” ancientanswers.org; and “Why Christians Must Acquire the Soul of a Poet,” Ancient Faith Ministries. On the “poetic soul” teaching from the book.