Liturgy As Icon of the Theological Imagination David W

Liturgy as Icon of the Theological Imagination David W. Fagerberg

Abstract. — Speaking of the theological imagination can appear, at first glance, quite paradoxical. After all, if imagination is defined as the activity the mind performs with images, then it would seem that there can be no imaginative knowledge of God, because God has no image. Thus, if we are to speak of the theological imagination, we can only do so if we hold that the imageless God condescends to be imaged – that God makes a prior, kenotic movement. On the basis of this point, this article argues that liturgy is the ontological condition for the theological imagination. The article first identifies the three ways in which God becomes an image. It then describes how the only environment in which these images can function as revelation for the theological imagination is the liturgy. Finally, it asserts that the rule of the theological imagination is found in the liturgical life of the Church.

I. The Background: Defining Liturgy as Source of Gnosis

Gennadios Limouris has defined the icon with a phrase that first appears simple, then becomes profound. He says “The icon, then, is the Christ, the God who became a face. Then it is also the faces of all the friends of God who are our friends and who insist on including us in their circle.”1 Christianity testifies before the world to a God who has become a face, and has left that countenance in the world as his mystical body. Amidst all the religious cults that the world practices, and the religious theophanies that the world receives, Christianity’s kerygmatic annunciation concerns the humanity of God. In this theology alone has God become a countenance, and that hypostatic union has yielded the Church, set the liturgy in motion, and generated icon. The argument that iconodules had with iconoclasts was not about a style of religious art, rather the former were arguing against a Christological heresy, and the latter’s defeat is called “the triumph of orthodoxy” to this day because

1. Gennadios Limouris, “The Microcosm and Macrocosm of the Icon: Theology, Spirituality and Worship in Colour,” Icons, Windows on Eternity, ed. Gennadios Limouris, Faith and Order Paper, 147 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1990) 119.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 227227 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 228 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

the defense of icons concerned the conviction that iconography became possible when the uncircumscribable became circumscribable. The incarnation made both liturgy and liturgical icon possible. This triumph of orthodoxy concluded an economy that found a foothold in Abraham’s faith, was confirmed in Mosaic law, became articulated in prophetic proclamation, and was the delight of wisdom literature. Then Mary, Seat of Wisdom herself, finally birthed the icon in the flesh. The Image of God is the Son, and every saint is an image of the Image of God. Ecclesiology is Christology extended liturgically to its fullest length across history. The icon is the God who became a face, and his friends. All liturgical things must pass through this hypostatic union in order to be Christian. Whatever does not, is human cult and not liturgy. Liturgy is not one of Adam’s religions, liturgy is the cult of the New Adam, and to participate in it one must plunge to death at the bottom of a baptismal font and emerge revivified by the Spirit of God. At its fullest, liturgy is the Trinity’s perichoresis kenotically extended to invite our synergistic ascent into deification. It is the prolongation of the Son’s agapic descent to simultaneously enable humanity’s eucharistic ascent. It is humanity’s “translation” to heaven, to borrow the medieval term for picking up a relic and laying it in a new home. Both the Son’s incarnation and humanity’s deification are accomplished by the Holy Spirit, as the Nicene Creed professes (the Son was “incarnate by the Holy Spirit” and the Holy Spirit is “Lord and Giver of Life”) and so the liturgical community, otherwise known as the Church, is therefore a trinitarian community, and all things in this community must pass through the hypostatic union to be of any use to liturgical theology: sacrifice, priesthood, sabbath, art, temple, and (pertinent to this conference) imagination. The liturgical imagination comes from a pneumatic immersion in a Christological path to the Father. I am going to remain satisfied with a fairly simple definition of imagination. For my purposes, imagination is the activity the mind performs with images. The mind’s faculties include more than imagination, of course, but this faculty is our concern here. Imagination is the faculty of representing sensible objects to oneself, even after the object is no longer making an impression on our senses. This was worked out by the medieval scholastics with an epistemological exactitude, but I am not going to follow them into refining this basic definition any further because I am more interested in a liturgical problem this definition yields for theology. If imagination is the activity the mind performs with images, then it would seem there can be no imaginative knowledge of God, because

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 228228 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 229

God has no image. This is apophatic theology in a nutshell, explained with doxological reverence by Dionysius. “How then can we speak of the divine names?” he asks. “How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding?” [emphasis added].2 Academic theology sometimes hastens past this apophatic principle, since the coin of its realm is precisely the discourse, apprehension and understanding that Dionysius says God eludes. Secondary theology ratiocinates conceptually. But primary theology pauses at this apophatic principle, and reminds us that any theology we manufacture from our reason and imagination depends upon a prior, kenotic move by God. Liturgy is the ontological condition for the theological imagination. “The heart of the Christian faith,” writes Fr. Andrew Louth, “is not something simply conceptual: it is a fact, or even better, an action – the action, the movement, of the Son sent into the world for our sakes to draw us back to the Father. And it is this movement that the liturgy, with its dramatic structure, echoes and repeats.”3 Behind all the liturgical maneuvers by the Almighty stands the paradox of apophasis and revelation. Apophasis and revelation is the liturgical paradox at work. At every liturgy, the One who cannot be known is praised, the One who cannot be seen is adored, the One who cannot be comprehended is embraced, the One who is enthroned above the heavens draws near to earth in intimacy, and the One who cannot be imagined occupies our imagination. I would therefore like to here present liturgy as the icon which makes possible the theological imagination of the Church. I do not mean this in a thin sense, as though a passage from a medieval sacramentary might arouse an academic, or the smells and bells might raise the stolid scholarly mind to imaginative raptures. The liturgy is not the product of a Christian’s imagination; rather, the Christian is a product of the liturgy. Liturgy shapes, forms, capacitates Christians, including their imagination. Theo- logical imagination is thinking within the mind of the Church. This is a somewhat thicker understanding of liturgy, one which understands liturgy itself to be an act of theologia prima. Liturgy is the basis for ecclesial

2. Dionysius, The Divine Names I.5 in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) 53. 3. Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 89.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 229229 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 230 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

theological imagination because here the mind has an image to behold, and in that sense I am calling the liturgy an icon. Theology is prayer, said Evagrius of Pontus: “If you are a theologian you truly pray. If you truly pray you are a theologian.”4 Theology’s primordial content and method is grounded in the liturgical act. This is the interpretation I would give to the traditional claim that lex orandi constitutes or founds the Church’s lex credendi. It means that theology comes out of a liturgical body which is in communion with God. When the Christian heart beats in sympathy with the divine perichoresis, then the heart’s conversion makes it into a theological organ. This is the case for every liturgist, by which I mean someone who commits liturgy, not someone who studies it. Every liturgist has the ascetical vocation of being formed more and more thoroughly by the tradition of the Church and becoming what Abbot Vasileios calls “a theologian soul.” “True theology is always living, a form of hierugy, something that changes our life and ‘assumes’ us into itself: we are to become theology. Understood in this way, theology is not a matter for specialists but a universal vocation; each is called to become a ‘theologian soul’.”5 Such a soul experiences a sympathy with the mind of God, and that soul’s liturgical imagination “knows more than it can say.” This is Michael Polanyi’s terse definition of tacit knowledge, and Andrew Louth acknowledges that the idea of tacit knowledge has deep resonance within the thought of the Fathers. “In them the tacit is interpreted as silence, the silence of presence, the presence of God who gives himself to the soul who waits on him in silence. The silence of the tacit makes immediate contact with the silence of prayer: and prayer is seen in the fathers to be, as it were, the amniotic fluid in which our knowledge of God takes form.”6 I think it not unfaithful to speak of this amniotic fluid as the Church’s prayerful, liturgical imagination in which theology takes form until its truth claims are born.

II. Theology’s Images

There can be no imaginative knowledge of God because the infinite One has no image. This, we said, is the apophatic leg of the liturgical

4. Evagrius, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. and intro. John Bamberger (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981) 65. 5. Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984) 27. 6. Louth, Discerning the Mystery, 65.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 230230 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 231

paradox. The other leg of the paradox notices that we can nevertheless engage in theologically imaginative discourse. How is this possible? It must be because the unimaginable one has become imaginable: literally, become “able to be imaged.” God will take on a face. Theology rests upon God turning his face toward us. For there to be theology, God must take his turn first. There are three tremors within the Godhead that Christian seismography has detected as he turns to face us. I would like to mention them first, and then argue that these revelations consum- mate in a mystery which is the essence of liturgy. Each requires liturgical realization in order to fully function in our theological imagination.

1. Creation The first tremor is creation – both the act, and the product. If we see creation in the light of liturgical theology, then this world is not just an vacant theater shell on which man’s ambitions can be staged. Rather, creation is a constant self-disclosure by God because creation is a constant self-giving by God. Each moment of creation rests upon a continual decision by God to sustain an existence in addition to himself. “The God who is Being is also Love and Goodness, and when these three attributes compound, other creatures get willed into existence … Creation is an overflow of the indwelling love that moves between the Father and Son and Holy Spirit (perichoresis in Greek, circumincessio in Latin). When this energy of love overflows, then there is space, time, and matter. Once there was nothing but God, and then God made something beside himself. If we dare say so, creation is God beside himself with love.”7 Creation is the consequence of ecstatic love. The adjective “ecstatic” here does not mean “excitable.” It is intended with an etymological accuracy that Fr Alexander Golitzin identifies in his study of Dionysian hierarchies. As we have said, the deity remains wholly outside the realm of discourse: it is wholly unknowable, ineffable, incommunicable. God is other. This is what led Platonism to suppose that our only access to the darkness lies through an act of ecstasy (ek, outside and stasis, to stand). For the creature to approach the creator “requires an out-going from self, a departure from the state of creaturely being…”8 So far, Greek philosophy. But Golitzin identifies a new move

7. David Fagerberg, “On Liturgical Marriage,” paper for a Bishops’ conference on marriage, http://www.usccb.org/laity/marriage/Fagerberg.pdf. 8. Alexander Golitzin, Et introibo ad altare Dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita, with Special Reference to Its Predecessors in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Thessaloniki: Analecta Vlatadon, 1994) 47.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 231231 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 232 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

by Dionysius, one which exonerates this ancient mystical theologian from the common accusation that he was adulterating the Gospel with Neoplatonism. It is here that we approach one of Dionysius’ fundamental, and Christian-inspired, adjustments of pagan thought. The key lies in the term ekstasis itself … If the creature may only encounter God as the latter is in his transcendence through “passing out” of its proper being, then conversely God may enter into relationship, including the act of creation, only through a kind of “self-transcendence.” Moved to create … God “leaves” in a sense the state of being, or “super-being” proper to him. He goes “outside” his hidden essence. It is this divine “out-passing” that is the foundation or subject of the Divine Names [Dionysius’ book] and, in so far as they are the mirrors of God, of the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies as well. God as he is known in his names and in his creation is God “outside,” as it were, of his essence.9 It is this divine out-passing that is the foundation or subject of Dionysius’ writings, namely, hierarchies. Theology is the science of studying how God turns out. The apophatic tradition does not deny that human imagination may receive revelation through created matter, it only asserts that when our theological imagination works upon an image taken from creation, we must realize that we are seeing God in a mirror, hearing God in an echo. Dionysius himself recognizes this way of human knowing by contrasting it to the way the angels know. The angelic minds “draw from Wisdom their simple and blessed conceptions. They do not draw together their knowledge of God from fragments nor from bouts of perception or of discursive reasoning.” But this is precisely what human minds do. He writes that human “sense percep- tions also can properly be described as echoes of wisdom…”10 But for our imagination to be an echo of wisdom, our ears must be unstopped, and our eyes made clear – in other words, our imagination must be purified and ordered. That is why the Eastern Orthodox tradition, at the head of which stand Evagrius and Dionysius, is cautious about imagination. Evagrius considers the highest prayer to be one without images, and Isaac of Nineveh defines divine vision as a non-sensible revelation to the intellect. The translators of the Philokalia include this glossary note.

9. Golitzin, Et introibo ad altare Dei, 48-49. 10. Dionysius, The Divine Names, 7.2.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 232232 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 233

It is true that images, especially when the recipient is in an advanced spiritual state, may well be projections on the plane of the imagination of celestial archetypes, and that in this case they can be used creatively, to form the images of sacred art and iconography. But more often than not they will simply derive from a middle or lower sphere, and will have nothing spiritual or creative about them. Hence they correspond to the world of fantasy and not to the world of the imagination in the proper sense. It is on this account that the hesychastic masters on the whole take a negative attitude towards them.11 This tradition is cautious about images because at its benign best, imagination gives the mind an unstable, flitting quality, and at its malevolent worst, imagination can be a source of temptation. Regarding the former, one of the fathers says we must restrain the mind in hesychastic prayer the way one would tether a bird: by tying a string to its leg so that whenever it flits this way or that it is brought back down to the task at hand. Regarding the latter, the tradition warns against logismoi, or prov- ocations by the demons, which, though not sinful in themselves, are the seeds of the passions.12 I will propose that to see the face of God turned to us in creation requires that we exercise our imagination with liturgical asceticism.

2. Scripture The second turning of God’s face to us is in Scripture. Ephrem the Syrian refers to this revelation in a startling way, designed to remind us of the apophatic divide God strode by the gift of the Scriptures. He speaks of God having “clothed himself in our language” and having “put on our metaphors.”13 It is like a first incarnation, which is exactly what Maximus the Confessor calls it. “When [the Word of God] is present to men who cannot with their naked mind reach naked spiritual realities, and converses in a way familiar to them in a variety of stories, enigmas,

11. Glossary, Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. and ed. by Palmer, Sherrard and Ware (Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1984). 12. Fr. Columba Stewart identifies two terms in Evagrian language, even if they are not used with perfect consistency. Logismoi usually identifies an external suggestion by demons, while noema means “concept” or “depiction,” and identifies the means by which the mind processes information. “Noemata are simply the way the mind functions, they are its currency. Evagrius follows Aristotle in seeing the mind as creating an inner world of conceptual depictions relating to the things external to the self.” Stewart, “Imageless Prayer and the Theological Vision,” A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008) 150. 13. Cf. Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985) 60-66: “The Garment of Names.”

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 233233 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 234 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

parables, and dark sayings, then he becomes flesh.”14 God has done this, says Ephrem, out of consideration for our minds. Scripture refers to His ‘ears’, to teach us that He listens to us; it speaks of His ‘eyes’, to show that He sees us. It was just the names of such things that He put on, and, although in His true Being there is not wrath or regret, yet He put on these names too because of our weakness.15 But God underwent this verbal kenosis for more than just peda- gogical reasons: “He clothed Himself in our language, so that He might clothe us in His mode of life,” says Ephrem. None of these conditions actually adhere in God, Ephrem is saying, but God permitted himself to be described this way in order to bring us into union with himself. The indescribable permitted himself to be described. A human scribe took down (de-scribed) the human words God spoke. In Scripture, God is teaching us to speak by clothing himself in our language. It is our first day in theology class. Fr Alexander Schmemann defined theology as “a search for words adequate to the nature of God.”16 The Logos is telling us what words to use about Theos: it is theo-logy class. Ephrem indulges an amusing illustration when describing God’s elementary speech therapy for theologians. A person who is teaching a parrot to speak hides behind a mirror and teaches it in this way: when the bird turns in the direction of the voice which is speaking it finds in front of its eyes its own resemblance reflected; it imagines that it is another parrot, conversing with itself. The man puts the bird’s image in front of it, so that thereby it might learn how to speak.

The bird is a fellow creature with the man, but although this relationship exists, the man beguiles and teaches the parrot something alien to itself by means of itself; in this way he speaks with it. The Divine Being that in all things is exalted above all things

14. “Maximus the Confessor, “Chapters on Knowledge” 2.60 in Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 60-61. 15. Brock, The Luminous Eye, 60, quoting Ephrem’s hymn Faith 31:1-7. 16. Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966) 14. The full passage reads, “Theology is above all explanation, ‘the search for words appropriate to the nature of God’ (theokprenei logoi), i.e. for a system of concepts corresponding as much as possible to the faith and experience of the Church. Therefore ht task of liturgical theology consists in giving a theological basis to the explanation of worship and the whole liturgical tradition of the Church.”

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 234234 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 235

in His love bent down from on high and acquired from us our own habits: He labored by every means so as to turn all to Himself.17 When God speaks through creation and Scripture, and we turn to look at the voice which is speaking, we nevertheless see our own resemblance reflected. I will propose that this second turn of God’s face to us also requires liturgical fulfillment. Liturgy is the matrix for hearing Scripture.

3. Hypostatic Union There is a third tremor we feel when God takes his turn. The God-Man invites us to deification, and tells us the way. More than telling us the way, the God-Man shows us the way. More accurately, still, he shows us himself as the way, the truth, and the life. Our imagination has not yet encountered a image that will satisfy us theologically, because so far we have seen created images through a glass, darkly (1 Cor 13:12, King James translation), or indistinctly, as in a mirror (1 Cor 13:12, NAB translation).But we do not want to see in a mirror, like the parrot. We want to see face to face. In our wildest imagination, we want not only to speak about God but with God. Being a theologian means being able to use the Christian grammar to speak face to face with God. This is liturgical theology. This requires that God and humanity be reconciled, which is why we may say Christ has brought about liturgical theology. “Cilia” names the fine hairs that make up our eyelashes. Re-con-ciliation means standing eyelash to eyelash with someone, eye to eye, face to face. The first clothing in names brought God out of the heavens into our language, the second clothing in the flesh brought God out of the heavens and placed him before our eyes. First the indescribable let himself be described; then the uncircumscribable let himself be circumscribed. In the first, a script was applied to God by the holy scribes; in the second, an image of the God made flesh is written by holy iconographers. Besides something to hear, we need someone to see. If we are to imagine our own deification, we need to behold an image of a human being in union with God. This is what all Christian antiquity said was the motive for the incarnation: God became human so that human beings might be made divine. What Christ is by nature, we are to become by grace.

17. Brock, The Luminous Eye, 62.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 235235 66/06/11/06/11 14:0514:05 236 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

Toward that end, he let himself be seen. God has become a face, and at last we have an image for our theological imagination. The operating metaphor for the modern concept of sight is the camera. The camera’s invention rests upon a theory of optics that understands light to bounce off solid objects, through a lens, to be written on film: a photo-graphe. Similarly, we think of light bouncing off material things through biological shutter lens of our eye, to be captured in the mind. The ancient world, however, understood sight differently, as a much more active faculty. Since the eye could seize an object at a far distance, the conclusion made by most, even if not by all the ancients, was that it did so by a light which emanated from the eye and targeted the object. (At least, it did so until the light in the eye was dimmed with old age.) The aggressive, almost violent act of sight grasps an image and takes it into the seer. Sense objects are taken into the imagination and memory. We are made up by what we have taken into mind and memory, to be recalled later by the act of imagination. In a sense more than merely metaphorical, we can say that we are made up by what we have seen. What we have seized by vision makes us up (so the ascetics counseled to keep “custody of the eyes”). We begin to look like what we look at. From this rough review of optical theory we can make a pointed conclusion: in order to become deified, we need a God-Man to look at. We must see what we are to become. In order for a human being to be deified, God would have to let himself be seen and seized. If we are to become a man-God we need a God-man to see. The incarnation is crucial to our salvation. So Ephrem says God “mingled the natures like pigments / and an image came into being: the God-man.”18 And Isaac of Nineveh says “Crea- tion could not look upon Him unless He took part of it to Himself and thus conversed with it, and neither could it hear the words of His mouth face to face … This came to pass when, as though in a treasury, He concealed His majesty with the veil of His flesh, and among us spoke with us in that body which His own bidding wrought for Him out of the womb of the Virgin.”19

18. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymn 8, “Hymns on the Nativity,” in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1989) 119. 19. Cited by Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev at http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/11/1/16.aspx.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 236236 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 237

III. The Images in Liturgical Imagination

I have suggested that if imagination is the activity the mind performs with images, then the theological imagination can only work if the imageless God condescends to be imaged. This is the theological meaning of icons: God has become a face. However, I now want to further assert that the environment where the images can function as revelation for the theological imagination must be the liturgy, a place of theologia prima. Schmemann describes liturgy as “the ontological condition of theology, of the proper understanding of kerygma, of the Word of God, because it is in the Church, of which the leitourgia is the expres- sion and the life, that the sources of theology are functioning precisely as sources.”20 Strange as it may sound, the turning of God’s face to us in creation, Scripture, and even the incarnation, require a liturgical locus for them to continue functioning as source for theological imagination. Each revelation requires a liturgical realization in order to fully function in our theological imagination Regarding the first, creation, we have already been led to the necessity for liturgical asceticism. The imagination – even the theological imagination – can only work properly when the passions are under control. (Hence in the final step of The Ladder of Divine Ascent John Climacus writes, “It is risky to swim in one’s clothes. A slave of passion should not dabble in theology.”21) Only when we are in right relationship with the world will material objects not stir gluttony, lust, avarice, dejection, anger, despond- ency, vainglory, or pride. These are the eight logismoi in Evagrius’ system. Creation’s beauty is ambiguous, capable of either tempting us to idolatry or being a road to true worship (ortho-doxia). For material images to awaken an orthodox imagination the mind must know this world in a liturgical light, and in our present state, knowing the world in a liturgical light requires ascetical discipline. It would have been different had the fall not upset the way our mind and body interact with the world. Theodoros the Great Ascetic writes, “I do not say that Adam ought not to have used the senses, for it was not for nothing that he was invested with a body. But he should not have indulged in sensory things. When perceiving the beauty of creatures, he should have referred it to its source.”22 But referring all things to their source is precisely the task of liturgy!

20. Alexander Schmemann, “Theology and Liturgical Tradition,” Liturgy and Tradition, ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990) 18. 21. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Classics of Western Spiri- tuality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982) 262. 22. St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, “Theoretikon,” Philokalia, vol. 2, 44.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 237237 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 238 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

The turn of God’s face to us in material creation, finds its fullness in the liturgical sanctification of matter. That is why, says Paul Evdokimov, “Alongside ‘kosmos noetos’ (the intelligible world) Holy Tradition sets ‘kosmos aisthetos’ (the sensible world). This latter encompasses the whole realm of what belongs to the senses in the sacraments, in the liturgy, in icons, and in the lived experience of God.”23 At liturgy the Church knows the world the way it ought to be known.24 In liturgy, all the ele- ments of creation – space, time, matter – are referred to their source, and thus coordinated at last. The liturgical imagination sees the true purpose of matter when it maintains the image’s teleological transitive. Created images must direct the imagination to the Creator, as C. S. Lewis says. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worship- pers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. Do you think I am try- ing to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to con- vince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.25 Every created thing will be received either as a sacrament or a temptation, and this is not due to the thing itself, it is due to whether the human perceiver is in a posture of right worship, or not. So long as the cataracts of passions cloud the eye, we will not see God’s countenance in material things. But the liturgical eye sees “with the eyes of the Dove,” as the Fathers of the Church called spiritual sight directed by the Holy Spirit. Standing in the temple, a microcosm of creation as it should exist under God, this eye sees the beginnings of a new heaven, a new earth, and a new humanity. It sees the pro-fanis on its way to fulfillment in the fanum that is the heavenly Jerusalem. It sees the redemptive dynamic

23. Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1990) 26. 24. An allusion to Aidan Kavanagh’s repeated assertion in class that “liturgy is doing the world the way the world ought to be done.” 25. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (New York: Collins Books, 1965) 97-98.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 238238 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 239

beneath raw phenomenon that brings the world to its transfiguration. Olivier Clement defines the Church as “nothing other than the world in the course of transfiguration.”26 Regarding the second, Scripture must be read within the liturgy to be heard as more than a text. The parrot turned to see who is speaking, but he only saw his own avian reflection; when we turn to Scripture, we must take care not to see only our own human concepts reflected. Thus it is within the womb of the liturgy that Scripture is more than history or poetry or ancient literature: it becomes address. The words of Scripture must be proclaimed through the mouth of the Church in order to be heard as coming from God. The words must become liturgical address, proclaimed as from the mouth of a lover who beguiles and woos and calls us to himself. Moving Scripture from the study desk to the ambo, perhaps in a procession accompanied by incense and candle, goes a long way toward transforming Scripture from a text book into a love letter. The “word of God” is not a text; the “word of God” is a Jew outside the walls of Jerusalem whose love brought him to a cross on our behalf. To experience this, the words of God must be read where the Word of God dwells. The words must be read from within the heart of the Church. In order to attend to the text as Scripture, we must desire the union with God that is the end of liturgy. It is a sacramental rendition of Scripture, for the Logos himself stands behind the mirror of human words, beguiling and teaching the human race something that is alien to itself. I mean deification. Regarding the third, it is even necessary for the incarnation itself to receive liturgical fulfillment, strange as it may sound, because if the incarnation does not end in liturgical cult, then we would be left with only words. Jesus in the flesh has ascended; he is no more to be seen as a visible image with our physical eyes. Leave aside the liturgical cult, and what remains is the original words of Scripture (the Old Testament), or the Apostles’ words about Jesus. Without the body of Christ, the Church in liturgical motion, we are left with a book. Without the liturgy of the Eucharist, we have the kerygmatic liturgy of the Catechumens, but this is not adequate for the full theological imagination. Liturgy is an icon of theological imagination because liturgy is a prolongation of the incarnation. To say that God has become a face is not only a Christological remark, it is an ecclesiological remark at one and the same time. Fr. Georges Florovsky said “the doctrine of the Church itself is but an

26. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (New York: New City Press, 1995) 95.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 239239 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 240 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

‘extended Christology’, the doctrine of the ‘total Christ’, totus Christus, caput et corpus.”27 The incarnated face of God remains on earth, still turned toward the world in the face of his mystical body. This is the sacramental principle of the mystical body, and three of the people who were influential for reviving this sensitivity, and ground- ing the theological imagination in the liturgical body, had connections to this very university. Virgil Michel defines the “sacramental principle” as the materializing and humanizing of God, and observes that Christ perpetuated the sacramental principle as found in Himself, when He instituted the Church as the continuation and expansion of His own divine self. The mystical body of Christ is a sacramental continuation of Christ, since the invisible being and life of Christ is hidden beneath the visible hierarchy and fellowship of His members, and the divine powers of Christ are exercised through certain visible human actions of the Church’s priesthood.28 When the Gospel is liturgically proclaimed and preached by the visible hierarchy within the fellowship of disciples, then the powers of Christ are being exercised.29 In short, liturgy is not the religion of Christians; liturgy is the religion of Christ perpetuated in Christians, as Blessed Columba Marmion defined liturgy. It is “the praise of Christ, the Incarnate Word, passing through the lips of the Church,”30 he wrote. And in another place, Jesus Christ, when upon earth, offered a perfect canticle of praise to His Father; His soul unceasingly contemplated the Divine perfec- tions, and from this contemplation came forth His continual praise and adoration to the glory of His Father. By his Incarnation, Christ associated entire humanity, in principle, with this work of praise. When he left us, He gave to his Church the charge of perpetuating, in his Name, this praise due to His Father.31 And so Fr. Emile Mersch speaks of the incarnation not as a one-time event, but as God’s modus operandi. “Christ has a twofold life on earth:

27. Georges Florovsky, “The Ever-Virgin Mother,” The Mother of God, a Symposium, ed. E. L. Mascall (Westminster, MD: Dacre Press, 1959) 52. 28. Virgil Michel, Our Life in Christ (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1939) 78. 29. This supports, it does not contradict, the reading of the first and second lessons by a lay person. He or she reads by virtue (by the power of) his or her baptism. It also supports, and does not contradict, the fact that the Gospel and the homily is proclaimed and preached by someone in the ordained office. 30. Columba Marmion, Christ, the Ideal of the Monk: Spiritual Conferences on the Monastic and Religious Life (Saint Louis, MO: Herder, 1926) 297. 31. Columba Marmion, Life of the Soul (London/Edinburgh/St. Louis, MO: Sands/Herder, 1926) 83.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 240240 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 241

one visible and historical, the other invisible and mystical; the first is the preparation for the second, and the second is the prolongation of the first. In the second, which is His mysterious existence in the depths of souls, Christ is far more active, far more truly alive than ever He was in the days when He walked and preached in Judea.”32 Without this prolongation in the Mystical Body, Christ’s life is tragic: too short a span, too little information, too ineffective a politic. “Christ appears for a brief time on the face of our earth and then vanishes. His historical life is but a preparation for a more expansive life … Jesus’ life appears to be a total failure when it is considered without reference to the Mystical Body in which it is continued.”33 That is why Christ’s life was directed toward his death, because his death was the climax of his life. “In the light of the doctrine, Christ’s death, far from marking his departure from this world of ours, is seen rather to effect a more profound penetration of Jesus into the souls of men. Jesus will continue to belong mystically to this earth; He will continue to act, to suffer, to affect its history, but in a new way: His history will no longer be separate from that of the world…”34 We now see why the icon is not only Christ, but also all the friends of Christ. Divine nature and human nature have touched in one hypostasis, and this has consequence for the entire human race. Mersch returns to this point throughout his work. The hypostatic union does not affect our Lord alone, but it is some- how prolonged in us, the members; we are the prolongation of the Head, and the hypostatic union renders us divine by reason of our continuity with the God-man.35 The divine life we receive is the life given in all plenitude to Christ’s human nature.36 The same hypostatic union causes to flow into our human nature the life that it imparts to the humanity of Christ.37 Liturgy is the icon for the theological imagination because it is the prolongation of the paschal mystery wherein the human face of God turned grey with death, and then white with glory, and now also trans- figures the faces of all of his friends.

32. Emile Mersch, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Co., 1938) 44. 33. Ibid., 51. 34. Ibid., 44. 35. Ibid., 283. 36. Ibid., 304. 37. Ibid., 356.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 241241 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 242 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

IV. Liturgy Capacitates the Imaginative Theologian

Liturgy is the basis for our ecclesial imagination because liturgy is the Christological, pneumatological, mystical, sacramental, and ecclesiological ground of Christian theology. By submitting to the discipline of the liturgical year, the liturgy of the hours, the Divine Liturgy, liturgical sacraments and sacramentals, the liturgist is formed in the image of the one at whom he or she gazes in the mysteries, and the liturgist becomes an image of the Image of God. Although there is the danger that an individual mind might succumb to diabolical agitations of fantasy in its fallen imagination, we can nevertheless interpret the Church’s liturgy as a source for theological imagination because the mind of the Church is a redeemed faculty, even if the minds of all her members are not yet fully so. This merits our closing attention, because otherwise the claim that lex orandi establishes lex credendi is ludicrous. If there is no rule to the theological imagination, then anything goes, which may be why some find the combination of “imagination” with “theology” unsettling. When I make the claim that liturgy is theologia prima it is for the reason that there is a grammar or rule to the liturgy’s lex orandi. The theological imagination can be awakened in Mrs. Murphy over the course of a life- time (to use the name Kavanagh coined to name a person formed by the rule of liturgy38) because she undergoes a process of formation I have come to call liturgical asceticism. The keystone in this proposition about Mrs. Murphy is to understand that the theological imagination brought into being by liturgy has a ruled form, just as an icon has a ruled form, just as our lives have a ruled form. To unpack this claim, I will join Fr. John Behr in borrowing an illustration from Irenaeus when he disputed with the Gnostics. These heretics, Irenaeus says, missed the meaning of Scripture even though they had the same collection of Scripture verses. How could that be? He proposes an explanation from the action of constructing a mosaic image. The heretics had the same collection of tile pieces (tessera) but erred in making the icon because they lacked knowledge about what the image was supposed to be. They used their tessera to fashion an image of a fox instead of a king.

38. “The language of the primary theologian … more often consists in symbolic, metaphorical, sacramental words and actions which throw flashes of light upon chasms of rich ambiguity. As such, Mrs. Murphy’s language illuminates the chaotic landscape through which I must pick my professional way with the narrow laser-like beam of precise words and concepts – which is why what she does is primary and what I do is secondary; which is why, also, what she does is so much harder to do than what I do. My admiration for her and her colleagues is profound, and it deepens daily.” Aidan Kavanagh, “Response: Primary Theology and Liturgical Act,” Worship 57 (July 1983) 323.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 242242 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 243

They disregard the order and the connection of the scriptures and, as much as in them lies, they disjoint the members of the truth. They transfer passages and rearrange them; and, making one thing out of another, they deceive many by the badly composed fantasy of the Lord’s words that they adapt. By way of illustration, suppose someone would take the beautiful image of a king, carefully made out of precious stones by a skilful artist, and would destroy the features of the man on it and change it around and rearrange the jewels, and make the form of a dog or of a fox out of them…39 The error they committed in improperly using Scripture can also be committed in improperly using tradition, or theology, or imagination. A heretical imagination and an orthodox imagination differ for the same reason as a heretical interpretation of Scripture and an orthodox one. Behr goes on to point out a second illustration by Irenaeus, perhaps less well known. Irenaeus observes that one might take lines out of a poem by Homer, rearrange them, and produce a Homeric-sounding poem which tells a tale not found in Homer. The thing missing in this case is the hypothesis. This was a technical term in Hellenistic literary theory, Behr explains. “The term ‘hypothesis’ had a variety of meanings. In a literary context, it meant the plot or outline of a drama or epic: that which the poet posits as the outline for his subsequent creative work. It is not derived from reasoning, but presupposed, providing a skeleton, as it were, which is enfleshed by the words of the poet exercising his talent.”40 Aristotle defines hypotheses as the starting points, or first prin- ciples of demonstrations. “For example, the goal of health is the hypothesis for a doctor, who then deliberates on how it is to be attained, just as mathematicians hypothesize certain axioms and then proceed with their demonstrations.”41 The heretics cannot read Scripture correctly because they are lacking the correct hypothesis. “The voice of the Lord, speaking throughout scripture, is the first principle, the (nonhypothetical) hypothesis of all demonstrations from scripture, by which Christians are led to the knowledge of the truth.”42 How does the Christian receive this hypothesis? Irenaeus replies that it was handed over in the baptismal canon: faith in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in one Jesus Christ who was enfleshed for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit. This canon of faith is the hypothesis that the heretics lack.

39. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 1.8.1, this translation in John Behr, The Mystery of Christ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006) 56. 40. Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 57. 41. Ibid., 57-58. 42. Ibid., 58.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 243243 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 244 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

Kavanagh notes that in the liturgical life of the Church there are intertwining Christian canons. The liturgy’s canonicity goes beyond the rules of formality and aesthetics. Nor is there only a single rule or canon governing liturgy. There are several canons, all of which compenetrate and interact to assure, insofar as canons may, that the liturgy of Christians does not drift into delusion and fantasy but remains worship in Spirit and in truth… First, there is the canon of holy scripture. This canon governs what the assembly deems appropriate that it should read and hear as it stands before God in worship… Second, there is the canon of baptismal faith summed up in the several trinitarian creeds. The earliest of these grew out of the three ques- tions put to candidates for baptism as they stood naked in the font concerning their faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit… Third, there is the canon of eucharistic faith which is carried in the assembly’s repertoire of eucharistic prayers or “canons of the Mss.”… Fourth, there is that body of canonical laws which regulate the daily living and the due processes of assemblies of Christians in conform- ity with the foregoing canons of scripture, creed, and prayer.43 What Kavanagh describes as canons at work in the liturgy may also be called “tradition,” I think. Each canon is a strand of the liturgical rope that connects us traditionally (i.e. by means of tradition) to the apostolic faith. Vladimir Lossky calls tradition the unique mode of receiving all the expressions that are in Scripture plus all that the Church can produce in words, symbols, or images. [Tradition] is not the content of Revelation, but the light that reveals it; it is not the word, but the living breath which makes the word heard at the same time as the silence from which it came … The pure notion of Tradition can then be defined by saying that it is the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, communicating to each member of the Body of Christ the faculty of hearing, of receiving, of knowing the Truth in the Light which belongs to it, and not according to the light of human reason.44 The words, symbols and images of liturgy are not under our control, but under the management of the Holy Spirit, if we conduct our litur- gies traditionally. Similarly, the imagination of the primary theologian is under management of the Holy Spirit. If, as Kavanagh says, neither our liturgy nor our liturgical theology is to drift into delusion or fantasy,

43. Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo Publishing, 1984) 139-141. 44. V. Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) 151-152.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 244244 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 245

but rather is to remain a productive and life-giving imagination, then we must worship in spirit and in truth. The hypothesis is the presupposed truth, providing a skeleton for our imagination to enflesh. Behr said the goal of health is the hypothesis for a doctor, who then deliberates on how it is to be attained. I suggest that the goal of deification – or supernatural health – is the hypothesis for a theologian, who then deliberates on how it is to be attained. Behr said the canonical hypothesis is the first principle which controls the movement of reason. I suggest this is what it means to call lex orandi the foundation for lex credendi: the first principle for theology is found in the liturgical life of the Church. This liturgical first principle may be thought of as “imaginative” since it is composed of images – in this case, images of heaven, images of the mystery, images of the uncircumscribable One, images of our deification, and so on. This is the liturgical paradox of apophasis and revelation at work. The icon of transfigured creation and deified person that is presented in every liturgy’s epiphany informs our theological imagination. How would we know what the sanctified world is supposed to look like if we did not have the liturgical icon of redeemed creation before our eyes? How would we compile our collection of days into a meaningful history if we did not know what the divine economy was aiming toward? How could we keep the maw of temporality from eating up our life if liturgy was not a foretaste of eternity? How could we use matter as building blocks of a cosmic temple if we did not know the liturgical end of sacramental matter? How could we rightly use our bodies, and love our neighbor, if we did not see that human beings are destined for deification? Irenaeus said the heretics went wrong in “disjointing the members of truth.” Liturgical theology cures this. It knits together the body of truth within the amniotic fluid of the liturgy in the womb of our mother, the Church. The liturgical icons set the mind free because they portray the unity of God, humanity and cosmos. By “liturgical icons” here I don’t mean the boards around the room, I mean the images of new life that the liturgy places before our eyes on the boards around the room, and in the Scriptures read, and in the sacrament on the altar, and from life emerging from the font, and in the chrism urn, and in the postures and gestures of a redeemed people standing aright, with fear, to offer their holy oblation to God, performing a sursum corda. The knowledge we have here is tacit, meaning we know more than we can say because we experience more than can be rationally accounted for. So liturgy is the source of theological imagination. Schmemann makes this contrast between rationalism and imagination:

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 245245 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 246 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

More than half of all words are incomprehensible to your rational- istic language, and therefore in addition to religion you will have to suppress all poetry, literature, philosophy and virtually the whole of human imagination. You desire the entire world to think as you do, in terms of production and economic forces, of collectives and pro- grams. Yet the world does not naturally think in this way and must be handcuffed and forced to do so … For everything most profound and most essential in life has always been expressed in the language of imagination.45 As does Chesterton. “Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion … The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”46 As does Kavanagh. “Like poetry and art and music, liturgy provides us a means of knowing the kind of thing that can only be known transrationally; that cannot be analyzed, taken apart, spelled out and reassembled … “Lives are changed because such things change minds, and minds are changed because imaginations are freed by giving human emotions a massive dose of normality. There is nothing easy about this.”47 There is nothing easy about freeing our imagination by a massive dose of normality, because the “change of mind” to which Kavanagh refers is not the flip flop of opinion, it is a conversion of life. New life, new mind, new way of thinking, new knowledge, new imagination: we are in the realm of liturgical asceticism now. Metanoia (repentance) means a change (meta) of one’s nous, after which there is an attraction between the converted mind and higher knowledge. Metropolitan Hierotheos cites several examples. According to St. Maximus there is an attraction between a pure nous and knowledge. [St. Maximus, Philokalia 2, 56, 32]. The Holy Spirit finds the pure nous and “initiates it accordingly into the mysteries of the age to be.” [Maximus, St Thalassios, Philokalia 2, 329] In this way the person becomes a theologian. For theology is not given by human knowledge and zeal, but by the work of the Holy Spirit which dwells in the pure heart. The nous which has been purified “becomes for the soul a sky full of the stars of radiant and glorious thoughts, with the sun of righteousness shining in it, sending the beaming rays of theology out into the world.” [Nicetas Stethatos,

45. Alexander Schmemann, Celebration of Faith. Vol. 3: The Virgin Mary (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995) 29. 46. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press), vol. 1, 220. 47. Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 169, 170.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 246246 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 LITURGY AS ICON OF THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 247

Natural chapters, ch 67] … Real theology is not a fruit of material concentration but a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. When a man’s nous is purified then he is illuminated and if his nous has the capacity, that is, wisdom, he can theologise. Therefore we say that his whole life, even his body itself, is theology. The purified man is wholly a theology.48 This is an unusual grammar to our ears. Yet the category of imagination might aid us in understanding what it means to say we are to become a theologian soul, that our body itself should become theology, that theologizing requires a pure mind, that Mrs. Murphy can be called a theologian by virtue of the liturgical ordering of her life. This is “theologia in the sense that this word had in Hellenistic antiquity: an enco- mium, a glorification in praise of the God about whom we are speaking.”49 The imagination that is shaped by liturgy has a rejuvenating effect on the theologian because it is an experience. It is an experience of the world as it was meant to be done, and an experience of the end toward which the theologian is pointed. It is knowledge from the inside, so to speak, which is a different way of acquiring knowledge, as Archimandrite Sophrony explains. The usual way to acquire knowledge, the one we all know, consists in the directing of the intellectual faculty outwards where it meets with phenomena, sights, forms, in innumerable variety – a differen- tiation ad infinitum of all that happens. This means that the knowledge thus acquired is never complete and has no real unity. Insistently seeking unity, the mind is forced to take refuge in synthesis, which cannot help being artificial. The unity arrived at in this way does not really and objectively exist. It is merely a form of abstract thinking natural to the mind. The other way to acquire knowledge of being is to turn the spirit in and towards itself and then to God. Here the process is the exact reverse. The mind turns away from the endless plurality and frag- mentariness of the world’s phenomena, and with all its strength addresses itself to God in prayer, and through prayer is directly incorporated in the very act of Divine Life, and begins to see both itself and the whole world. To obtain knowledge after the first manner is natural to man in his fallen state. The second is the way of the Son of man.50

48. Metropolitan Hierotheos, Orthodoxy Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers (Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1994) 147. 49. Louis Bouyer, The Eucharist (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 113. 50. Archimandrite Sophrony, The Monk of Mount Athos: Staretz Silouan 1866- 1938 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989) 60.

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 247247 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06 248 DAVID W. FAGERBERG

The way the Son of man obtains knowledge has been shared with his disciples, and it is even now being shared with those disciples who are his liturgical body. At last the imagination can be exercised without the diabolical dangers it had for the sinner. At last the phenomena and sights of creation find their oneness as the eye gazes upon the oneness of their Creator. At last the mind knows the world according to the hypothesis of its maker, because the theological imagination has been incorporated into the very Divine Life itself, which the Church holds in her womb, as once Mary held that life in hers. This is the essence of liturgy, and it produces imaginative people. Iconographers write icons (graphe). We are each writing our own life history (an auto bios graphe). And the God who wrote the law upon two tablets of stone with his finger of fire can write a new life upon hearts of stone with the finger of his Holy Spirit. Then the theologian becomes, himself, an autograph (auto-graphe) of God. Liturgy is theography. More important than how we imagine God, is how God imagines us. In liturgy, the deified saint becomes what up until now was hidden in God’s own imagination. So here is how Limouris concludes the passage which initiated this paper: The Kingdom of God is anticipated, either starting from the beauty of the world, though this is an ambiguous beauty, or starting from certain faces, certain old faces, fashioned by a long life, faces which have not been plunged into resentment or bitterness or the fear of death, faces of those who do not flinch as they approach death, faces that know precisely where they are, and have found again the mind of a child. Thus the countenance of Christ is turned through our faces to the world. The hope of the world lies in the capacity of the Church to arouse the imagination of a people who walk in darkness, that they might be drawn to great light.

David W. Fagerberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and senior advisor to the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy. Address: Department of Theology, 339 Malloy Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556. E-mail: [email protected].

994434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd4434_LouvainStudies_2009-2_06.indd 248248 66/06/11/06/11 14:0614:06