ESSAYS ON TRUE ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY

In the service for the Greater Blessing of the Waters, there is a prayer in which we read: “Of four elements hast Thou compounded the creation”… Some may think that this is proof of the primitive scientific knowledge of the ancients. After all, we know now that the creation is compounded of all kinds of elements at various levels of complexity – molecules, atoms, electrons, subatomic particles, quarks, even the recently discovered so-called “God particle”. In fact, there is no such thing as a single water “element”, for example: there is just a molecule composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.