Order and Harmony

St. Athanasius, The Contra Gentes

Thus, at the very beginning of part two of his Contra Gentes, Athanasius called attention to the difference between God’s essential invisibility and man’s inability to comprehend anything not mediated through the visible….

In Athanasius’s words

“For this God by His own word gave the Universe the Order it has, in order that since He is by nature invisible, men might be enabled to know Him at any rate by His works.” Shortly afterwards Athanasius states again: “God so ordered Creation that although He is by nature invisible He may yet be known by His works.”

In chapters 35, 36 and 37, Athanasius lists various examples of order in the physical universe and begins chapter 38 with the affirmation:

“Since then, there is everywhere not disorder but order, proportion and not disproportion, not disarray but arrangement, and that in an order perfectly harmonious we needs must infer and be led to perceive the Master that put together and compacted all things, and produced harmony in them.”

Athanasius brings that chapter to a close with the argument that only when there is no trace of cosmic disorder, that is, “when the order of the whole universe being perfectly harmonious… it is consistent to think that the Rule and King of all Creation is one and not many.”

–Stanley L. Jaki [Christology and the Birth of Modem Science]