Here in California there’s a debate about licensing cosmetologists. For my part, I wish there weren’t any to license. Plato would understand. In his Gorgias he compared politicians with cosmeticians. Both are busy about disguising reality.

Cosmologists are another matter altogether. They’re the folks keen to answer the big questions about the cosmos. Plato would heartily approve. In his Timaeus he reflects on the cosmos and our place in it. He supposes that a Demiurge fashioned it from a primordial chaos.

Truth be told, until recently my own interest in the cosmos, and even in our solar system, has been tepid. Sorry, but space travel strikes me as best left to adventure movies. Ditto for colonizing Mars. I’ve never even pined to sleep under the stars of Australia. Golly, I’ve even called attention to the rather dismissive words of the mathematician (and friend of Wittgenstein) Frank Ramsey: “[I attach] little importance to physical size,” and so “I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does.”

Ramsey is right, of course, about the stars not being able to think or love. But the stars give us a sense of the vastness of the universe, and that vastness invites questions about how our star-studded cosmos came about. Perhaps Ramsey, an atheist, suppressed such questions. In the sharpest of contrasts, the Christian persists in raising the question of how the cosmos came to be. In answer to our question, Revelation answers that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. Neither a demiurge nor an angel but rather the Triune God creates all things and keeps them in existence. To be created is to be loved by God.

We ourselves come to be in the context of the cosmos. Thus, in his “In the Beginning…,” a Carthusian poet known only as Brother A writes:

Exultantly the Word went flaming
Down abysmal galaxies
And beat upon the drums of brooding
Night that woke and the race was born.

Unlike Frank Ramsey we ought to feel deeply humble before the vastness of the heavens. (I need to take this to heart.) And yet we are its voice, so we are not to sink within it. Rather, we are to rise above it.

We can also rise above our own political constructions. Often seen as our most ambitious and distinctive efforts, many of us treat them as idols. The memorable “whiskey priest” in Graham Greene’s classic The Power and the Glory is instructive in this regard. Thinking of the daughter he has fathered, he tells himself, “That was the difference between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.”

The cosmos, the Earth especially, is our home. And yet, unlike either of them, we in our freedom are each capax Dei, capable of loving God. Not to love is a catastrophe. Consider how egregiously John Henry Newman affronts the reigning secularity. “The Catholic Church,” he writes, “holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.”

We are now close upon the Epiphany. In celebrating this feast, we celebrate God’s revealing Himself to those who have been far off from the Chosen People. He does so in the reception of the Magi. And who are they? They are Wise Men from the East. And how have they found their way to Bethlehem? They have done so by following, yes, a star. We can find in their welcome a foreshadowing of the final reconciliation between the Creator, his heavens, and our favored earth. Gaudete omnes — let us all rejoice!