The following is written by one of the greatest and least known theologians of the 20th century, Panagiotis Nellas-
First is the Triune God. It is around His throne that the faithful
assemble. The night, which through the darkness and the silence
stills the senses
of the body,
the Alleluia, the hymns to the Holy Trinity, the
iconography of the church, all help the human person to turn towards the Triune
Deity, to place himself in His presence.
The aim is that the
faithful gathered together in the church should find themselves again in their
Father's House, that the world should change through repentance and prayer, and
that the ancient Home should be reconstituted in the Church.
Above all, the second
person of the Holy Trinity is actively present with an effectiveness which we
should call natural, since the created portion of our world which He assumed
and rendered infinite by making it His body is
the Church, within which our space and time find their new dimensions, those
dimensions which allow us to celebrate acts of worship. The assembly of the
faithful takes place literally in the body of Christ, Christ being our House.
The incarnate Logos, the
Lord Jesus, is present with an immediate, existential effectiveness. He is the loving Redeemer, the crucified
Bridegroom, who wounds the hearts of the faithful with His love and calls them
to a mystical erotic union.
Next it is the Mother of
God who is present in a similarly effective way. Her own body is the body of
the God-man, the body which is the Church. Mary is the Theogennitria, she who gave birth to God. Within her the great
marvel was realized that one of the Trinity should become that which we are.
She is the Gate and the Ladder which unites earth with heaven, which causes a
saving breach to be made in the boundary enclosing our time and space, and
even now already brings into the world things which transcend it.
The Mother of God is moreover
the loving consoler of the faithful in the arid time of fasting, their champion
in the night-long struggle of prayer, the guide leading to Christ, the
intercessor for sins, the conductor of the bride in the mystic union. The
faithful converse also with her as they do with Christ.
We find it difficult today
to understand the deeply rational nature of ecclesiastical acts and practices-Mysteries, services, festal cycles, prayer,
ascesis, and repentance-because we
are hindered by a mono-dimensional, pedestrian concept of space and time. But
within the Church another cosmology holds sway. This different conception of
space-time is expressed by Byzantine architecture and iconography and is also presupposed by Byzantine hymnography.
The architectural whole, the icons,
the hymns-"Today He
hangs upon the
cross," "Come, let us be crucified with Him"- are not parables or verbal patterns, the creation of a
well-endowed imagination, but express a reality in precisely the same way that
the new birth which is granted by baptism, and the communion of the body and
blood of Christ which takes place in the divine Eucharist, are not metaphors
but realities. Unless we take seriously the different cosmological and anthropological settings within
which the Church lives and moves, it is impossible for us to understand Byzantine art or biblical, patristic and
liturgical texts, and it is equally impossible for us to understand the rationality and reality underlying the
specific manner in which the Church's life is constructed as an active,
decisive, salvific reorganization and refashioning of the limited dimensions
and functions of the created world and the created being of man.
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