On the Order of Things

“Peace is the tranquility of order,” St. Augustine tells us. And it is notable that the conception of both peace and order in his famous dictum transcends the political in the narrow sense. Rather, the Bishop of Hippo was getting to the roots of the question, to the foundational arrangement of all things in divine wisdom and love. Peace, then, requires an attunement to the order of the cosmos, from the atomic to the astronomic. In a world marked by disorder in virtually every sphere, it behooves us, no less than Augustine, to explore the wellspring of peace to be found in the order of creation.