Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 10 - November 2, 2019
Once these dichotomies are accepted, it does not matter, theologically speaking, whether one “accepts” the world, as in the case of the Western enthusiast of “secular Christianity,” or “rejects” it, as in the case of the “Super-Orthodox” prophet of apocalyptic doom. The optimistic positivism of the one, and the pessimistic negativism of the other are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. Both, by denying the world its natural “sacramentality” and radically opposing the “natural” to the “supernatural,” make the world grace-proof, and ultimately lead to secularism. And it is here, within this
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It is indeed much easier to live and to breathe within neat distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the natural and the supernatural, the pure and the impure, to understand religion in terms of sacred “taboos,” legal prescriptions and obligations, of ritual rectitude and canonical “validity.” It is much more difficult to realize that such a religion not only does not constitute any threat to “secularism,” but on the contrary, is its paradoxical ally.
On the other hand, the same act of blessing may mean the revelation of the true “nature” and “destiny” of water, and thus of the world—it may be the epiphany and the fulfillment of their “sacramentality.” By being restored through the blessing to its proper function, the “holy water” is revealed as the true, full, adequate water, and matter becomes again a means of communion with and knowledge of God.
The spiritual confusion is at its peak. But is it not because the Church, because Christians themselves, have given up so easily that unique gift which they alone—and no one else!—could have given to the spiritually thirsty and hungry world of ours? Is it not because Christians, more than any others today, defend secularism and adjust to it their very faith? Is it not because, having access to the true mystērion of Christ, we prefer to offer to the world vague and second-rate “social” and “political” advice? The world is desperate in its need for Sacrament and Epiphany, while Christians
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we do not need any new worship that would somehow be more adequate to our new secular world. What we need is a rediscovery of the true meaning and power of worship, and this means of its cosmic, ecclesiological, and eschatological dimensions and content.
In the early tradition, the causality inherent in the sacrament, the sanctification it procures for those who partake of it, is inseparable from its symbolism, for it is rooted in it. This in no way limits or contradicts the unique cause of all sacraments—their institution by Christ—for, as we have said already, the institution is precisely the fulfillment of a symbol by Christ and, therefore, its transformation into a sacrament. It is thus an act, not of discontinuity, but of fulfillment and actualization. It is the epiphany—in and through Christ—of the “new creation,” not the creation of
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the doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology.
that which exists, as its Creator, Redeemer, and fulfillment. The transformation of the sacrament in post-patristic theology consisted, therefore, in its isolation within a self-contained and self-sufficient sacramental “organism.” That external isolation of the sacrament from the liturgy which we mentioned before was, indeed, “symbolical” of a much deeper change.
It is when they were exalted and glorified as supreme reality that there began the progressive alienation from them of theology, ecclesiology, and eschatology, an alienation which—whether it is understood or not—is at the origin of today’s crisis, the source and the poison of “secularism.”
no word in patristic texts is “absolute” in itself, but each receives its meaning, its theological “semantics” only within a wider theological and spiritual context.
One does not know what this symbol is, but that which one hopes for from it is indeed much closer to the patristic idea and experience of symbol than those of the post-patristic age, and this is why we call it a bridge.
The Christian, however, by definition ought to know. Does he not confess Christ to be both the light and the life of the world, the fulfillment of all knowledge and the redeemer of all existence? In terms just described, which are the very terms of the world’s search for “symbol”—is he not indeed the Symbol of all symbols?
For the whole point is that holy is not and can never be a mere adjective, a definition sufficient to guarantee the divine authority and origin of anything. If it defines anything it is from inside, not outside.
It is this “holy”—the power of an epiphany—that is hopelessly missing today in both doctrine and institution, and this, not because of human sins and limitations, but precisely because of a deliberate choice: the rejection and the dissolution of symbol as the fundamental structure of Christian “doctrine” and Christian “institution.”
The situation is not relieved in the least by the many “modern” Christians, even theologians, who join the others in crying for “new symbols” and who think that Christianity will recover its “relevance” for the world if only Christ could be shown to be the “symbol” of this or of that, the “illustration” of an ideology, the “image” and the “personification” of an attitude.
They hopelessly do not understand that for Christ to be “symbol” of anything in the world, the world itself must, in the first place, be known, viewed, and experienced as the “symbol” of God, as the epiphany of his holiness, power, and glory—that, in other terms, it is not “Christ” or “God” that have to be explained in terms of this world and of its passing needs so as to become their “symbols” but, on the contrary, it is God and God alone that has made this world his symbol, has then fulfilled this symbol in Christ and will consummate it in his eternal Kingdom. When deprived of this symbol
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