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.
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