Kosmos

Kosmos (κόσμος) means, first of all, order — the right arrangement of parts into a harmonious whole, as in the disciplined order of an army or the good order of a well-governed city. From this it took a second sense: ornament, adornment, the beauty that arises from due arrangement (the source of our word cosmetic). The two senses are one: a thing is beautiful because it is well-ordered.

The world as order

Tradition credits Pythagoras with being the first to call the whole universe kosmos, beholding in the heavens — the regular turning of the stars, the ratios of the musical scale mirrored in their motions — a supreme instance of order and beauty. To name the world kosmos is already to make a philosophical claim: that the universe is not a chaos but an arrangement, governed by proportion and intelligible to reason. It stands opposed to chaos, the primal gaping void.

Plato's Timaeus is the great hymn to this idea: the Demiurge, looking to the Forms, fashions the cosmos as a single living being, as beautiful and as good as a thing of becoming can be, ensouled and intelligent. The order of the world is the visible trace of the intelligible order above it. To contemplate the kosmos rightly, then, is itself a step in the soul's ascent — the beauty of the ordered whole drawing the mind upward toward its source.