Cultural Encounters: A Journal For The Theology Of Culture Volume 10 Number 2 (Summer 2014) | Page 16

LITURGICAL TELEOLOGY - Augustine movement toward cosmic transfiguration is to flow from the actualized human destiny in theosis, which involves the internalization of Paradise (the appointed place for communion with the Creator as a God-made sanctuary) until humanity presents itself as a sanctuary for God. Thus, “always carrying Paradise”23 in himself or herself, the human being is to take it wherever he or she goes and mold the world into its likeness through its creative, cultivating activity. The pro-creation of humanity becomes an organic, God-ordained vehicle moving toward the actualization of this telos. The human being is commanded to be fruitful, multiply, and populate the earth (Gn 1:28), for the globe is to be covered with the living, embodied communion of matter and Spirit (a destiny engraved into human ontology as union of body and spirit) until the entire world has become a sanctuary for the divine presence. This calling depicts the priestly agency of the human community to all of creation for the sake of gathering it eschatologically in union with the Creator. Indeed, ontologically, the first Adam represents the communion of heaven and earth as the mystical unity of matter and spirit—of the visible and invisible, the created and uncreated. Thus, according to Dimitru Staniloae, the human being appears last within the divine creative act “as a kind of natural link (syndesmos) between the extremities of the whole” so that on behalf of the cosmos, he or she may maintain and fulfill “the allencompassing mystery that is the union of God with creation,” and may be “the conscious and willing means through which God maintains and fulfills this union.”24 Human agency is, therefore, essential for this profound transformation of the cosmos into Paradise, because the theosis of humanity is the condition for the theosis of the rest of creation. But theosis cannot be imposed upon the human creature: it has to come from a voluntary synthesis of freedom and grace.25 As Lossky states, “a single will for creation, but two for deification.”26 Thus, “God becomes powerless before human freedom,” for it proceeds from the divine omnipotence and is indispensable for humanity’s teleological actualization (as the icon of God in the cosmos) in unconditional love for the 23. Lossky, Eastern Orthodox Theology, 74. 24. Dimitru Staniloae, The Sanctifying Mysteries, vol. 5 of The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012), 4. 25. Lossky, Eastern Orthodox Theology, 74. 26. Lossky, Eastern Orthodox Theology, 73. 11