Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God by David L. Schindler
Author:David L. Schindler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-09T10:15:00+00:00
What is crucial here, says Schmemann, is that we see that "the very notion of worship implies a certain idea of man's relationship not only to God but also to the world" (emphasis added); and that we see also that it is "the idea of worship that secularism explicitly or implicitly rejects" (ii9).
Schmemann's argument hinges on what he calls the sacramental or symbolic character of the world - that is, of space and time and matter and body and motion - and of the human being's place in the world (cf. 120, 139). Worldly realities find their true meaning precisely as worldly in their character simultaneously and intrinsically as epiphanies of God. Schmemann, in this book and again in his Journals,2 stresses how Christian theology, by virtue of a certain longstanding understanding of sacrament, has itself contributed to draining the world of its structurally symbolic character, and this notwithstanding what is often an intense piety in other respects. He explains thus:
At the end of the twelfth century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements is "mystical" or "symbolic," it is not real. (128)
Unfortunately, Schmemann says, the Lateran Council that condemned Berengarius largely reversed the formula:
It proclaimed that since Christ's presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not "mystical." What is truly decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice, the acceptance, on both sides, that they are mutually exclusive. (128-29)
The consequent assumption is that
that which is "mystical" or "symbolic" is not real, whereas that which is "real" is not symbolic. This was, in fact, the collapse of the fundamental Christian mysterion, the antinomical "holding together" of the reality of the symbol, and the symbolism of reality. It was the collapse of the fundamental Christian understanding of creation in terms of its ontological sacra mentality. (129)
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