The Crisis of the Symbolic Universe ~ The Imaginative Conservative

During the last few centuries, while exploring the material world more deeply, many people have lost the way towards their own self, that inner sanctum where they can meet the Creator of both Man and of World. Thus the symbolic universe seems to have been forgotten, even though it is always there to be discovered.

In an analysis of the way in which allegory is perceived nowadays (Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of TheologyOxford, 1989), Professor Andrew Louth, well versed in the work of the masters of mystical exegesis – St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor – reveals the main cause for the current state of affairs: namely, the abandonment by some interpreters of the ecclesiastical universe, of the living tradition, the only environment in which Sacred Scripture becomes a gate to the “invisible” world.

According to St. Augustine, the vital element in this hermeneutic environment is the Christian supernatural faith itself, such as it has been defined, guarded and passed on throughout the centuries under the guidance of the Church. In order to gain access to the core of the ecclesiastical tradition, the complete assimilation of a well-defined creed was necessary, as well as an adequate initiation, which transposed the believer into another world: “the Kingdom of Heaven,” The Christian living in the first centuries entered, through this initiation, a symbolic universe that entirely changed his perspective on the world, opening the gates of the invisible.

Nowhere can the elements of the symbolic universe be better perceived than in liturgy – that is to say, in the context of formal worship, played out between the two terms of the cosmological equation, God and Man. But here a crucial question arises: what is it that links these two points together, incommensurable as they are, separated by the infinite distance which separates the Creator from the created? The key concept that may provide the answer might seem trifling, since it is so commonly employed in the theological and liturgical vocabulary of the Church. It is what in the English language is called “glory” (from the Latin glory).

Having several correspondents in Greek – the best known of which are κυδος and δόξα – the concept of “glory” reveals the most profound reality of our being, that which renders us as creatures made in God’s image and likeness, endowed with an innate liturgical vocation (a vocation to worship). Glory is the axis that upholds the entire creation, ensuring the bond between the uncreated, spiritual “Heaven” – God – and the created “Earth” whose crown is Man. Glory is the substance that fills the impassable abyss, the bridge that God has flung between himself and his creature, the Man who “was created in order to praise, glorify and serve God, our Lord” (Saint Ignatius of Loyola). Glory is the axis which connects the increate to the created nature and which, in the old pre-Christian traditions, used to be symbolically represented by the Cosmic Tree or the Mountain in the center of the world.

Exploring the depths of this reality, we will discover in the texts of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church help in penetrating ever deeper into the theo-centric mystery of the creation. Just as uncreated Wisdom must be distinguished from created wisdom, so uncreated and created glory must be distinguished. Uncreated Glory belongs to the Creator, who bestows it upon his creatures under the form of grace, the gifts which we receive through the tender and perpetual workings of the Holy Spirit “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Created glory, however, belongs to the creature, being virtually “nothing” (µή όν) compared to the Glory of God. In a truly incomprehensible manner this nothingness It is animated, filled with life, when directed towards its Creator to “glorify” him. Should it be miss-directed, however, created glory becomes “vain glory,” upholding the illusive reality known as “evil.”

The exchange of glory between the Creator and the creature is accomplished on “the tallest mountain on earth,” the symbolic Sinai embodied by the altar, where the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ the Savior takes place. Reading texts such as The Life of Moses by Saint Gregory of Nyssa or On Priesthood by Saint John Chrysostom we may perceive the cosmic dimension of liturgical service in front of the altar which makes of God’s priests the “highest” beings on the face of the earth. Yet due to the original sin, to the ontological “fall” which plunged the entire created being into a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions, there is a gap between the celestial Liturgy described by the apostle John in his Apocalypse and the liturgies held “down here, ” in the sublunary world. Here again we encounter the serious problem of the degradation of religious (ie, sacred) symbolism.

The Fall ushered in the appearance of an abyss between the Creator and the creature; God withdrew the sanctifying grace bestowed on our Protofathers, offended by the sin of disobedience, the first “deadly” sin that was the origin of all the others. Ever since that moment, as we understand from Saint Maximus the Confessor’s interpretation of the Old Testament episode in which the sinuous journey of the prophet Jonas is described, human nature has been immersed in the matter of the sensible world, dramatically diminishing its sense of the supernatural. Created “glory” was directed, wrongly, from the Creator towards the visible world, and the original harmony melted into the air. Man became a dweller in the chasm of the sea, as was shown by both Plato (in Phaedo) and St Maximus the Confessor (in Questions for Thalassius). That is to say, we no longer learn in our present state the realities of the spiritual world “face to face”, but only see them “dimly as in a mirror” (as Saint Paul would say).

In this context marked by sin, God takes a dumbfounding decision: the rebuilding of Paradise from the very heart of the fallen world, bringing before our eyes clad in mist, looked in matter, the lights “from above,” from the intelligible world. How could I accomplish such a surprising project? First he endowed us with “clothes of skin” (δερµατίνοι χιτόνες), a wrapping which, more or less, protects us from the rapid degradation (ie, corruption) of the sensible world in order to point analogously to the eternal realities towards which we must redirect ourselves. The elements we know are symbols.

Structured around the center of the symbolic universe – the Holy altar – they cloak the interiority of the Temple. Then, in “the fullness of time” that one who is “the Father of lights,” of those lights that pour in cascades, hierarchically (according to Dionysius the Areopagite) from high above unto our world, he himself descends among us, restoring the broken bond between uncreated nature and created, human nature. Despite this, symbols remain necessary. Christ “ascended to heaven, at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty” – a fact that indicates the persistence of a certain distance separating the terrestrial “Church militant” from the celestial “Church triumphant.”

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The modern development of natural and technical sciences and of mechanical, electronic and digital artifacts was not accompanied by a similar development in our spiritual life. On the contrary, during the last few centuries, while exploring the material world more deeply, many people have lost the way towards their own self, that inner sanctum where they can meet the Creator of both Man and of World. Thus the symbolic universe seems to have been forgotten, even though it is always there to be discovered. But it will not be discovered without a certain state of the intellect sustained by the supernatural light of Christian faith. The schools where we can re-learn the language of religious symbolism are our sacred churches. But have the symbols in the churches spoken to us recently? That’s the question…

TO THE GREATER OF GLORY!

Republished with gracious permission of the author from Second Spring: International Journal of Faith & CultureOxford, Seven, 2006, pp. 6-8.

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