Views of the Cosmos by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

We sense that the world is perceived as but a small island surrounded by deep mystery.

There are two views of the cosmos which find expression in early myths about the world’s origin: an “open” worldview and a “closed” one. To the open worldview the universe is an immense house, as it were, with transparent walls. But outside it is night. Beyond the transparent walls lies the darkness of mystery, the invisible presence of the utterly Other, nameless, imageless. And as humans try to understand the mystery in which the world is embedded, they begin to project images onto the walls of glass behind which lies the night of the Great Question.

Poetic imagination creates images of the Invisible, a wall of images that turns out to hide more than it reveals. The darkness of human loneliness and estrangement in the world becomes filled with dreams. At last we can become so preoccupied with the dream images our own mind has projected onto the walls of our cosmic house that we lose the power of looking through at the night. The transparent walls become opaque and finally a closed worldview denies that any mystery at all could lie beyond.

As we study the worldview of ancient peoples, going as far back as we can in history and prehistory, the picture of earliest religion thus revealed stands in sharp contrast to the preconceived notions anthropologists had in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They simply took it for granted that all religious notions and the human mind in general must have developed step by step in close parallel to physiological evolution from a “savage” stage to ever greater refinement. Within our century, however, a wealth of objective material has been accumulated which proves that the most ancient cultural stratum to which we can penetrate by anthropological methods is simple but by no means “savage.”

One remarkable feature of the oldest known religious beliefs is the notion of a Supreme Being who is beyond the world, in no way part of the cosmos, and often said to be its maker and sustainer. Sometimes the way in which this Supreme Being made the world is described in elaborate myths; sometimes only the fact of creation is stated, as when the Baining of New Britain say: “He brought all things into being by inexplicable ways.” Frequently the Supreme Being is described as making the world by thinking it, by a word of command, by singing or by merely wishing it to be. The Wijot in northern California, for example, say: “The Old Man Above did not use earth and sticks to make men. He simply thought, and there they were.” At this point we must remind ourselves that a creation myth, though cast in the form of an historic account, is basically a metaphysical statement. It is a story. A story in answer to a question: What happened in the beginning? But “the beginning” is here a temporal expression for an ontological insight. When the child or the childlike mind of the mythmaker asks what happened before, always this question concerns the link between all that is and the source of it all. It seems to be more difficult for the adult mind than it is for the child to intuit that the Source of all there is cannot possibly be an additional something. It is Mystery.

Filled with wonderment like a true philosopher, the child says: “the world is so you have something to stand on.” We sense that the world is perceived as but a small island surrounded by deep mystery. In fact, we must put this definition of a house side by side with that of a floor. “A floor,” says the child,” is so you don’t fall into the hole your house is in.” This is what it means to see the world on the background of mystery. What really counts for the child and the mythmaker is the relationship of things to that background. That is the real concern of a creation myth.

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