The pictures seen above are of the Church of Saint Dimitrios Loumbardiaris and its environs. It was designed by the renowned Greek architect Dimitrios Pikionis. I have chosen to examine this Church as part of the Nea-Synaxis project on this blog because I believe it to be of the utmost dogmatic and kerygmatic significance.
This Holy Temple is a silent doxology created from the broken detritus received from the very place that the temple was to be built. The every day and mundane material which this temple is made has received the breath of God, the Holy Spirit, and has thus become a place of the Son’s parousia. This is a place and event of salvation because here we find that “the life of the Church is uncreated. But the material out of which the Church is constructed, her body, is created material of every period. The uncreated life reconstructs, reanimates, and enlarges created being to infinity, in other words deifies it…” The Church possesses uncreated life because she is the “extension of the Incarnation, is brought into being by the hypostasizing of creation in Christ.” This is true because the Church is Eucharist. It is a people gathered together in a specific place and time being formed into the body of Christ. Just as the Incarnation was the historical event of the Son of God taking up part of creation (the humanity He received from the Theotokos), the event of the Eucharist is an event in which a group of people are “taken up” into the Kingdom of God through participation in the Body and Blood of Christ realized in the Holy Spirit. The event of the Incarnation being a historical reality means that the humanity, the creation assumed by God, was not humanity in a vacuum, but biologically (through His mother), culturally (Jewish of the 2nd temple era), and historically and geographically (1st century Palestine) truly human. Christos Yannaras makes the same claim for the parish as Eucharistic gathering when he writes,
Since then, every time the Christological proto-type of existence is realized, in each particular Eucharist community, it too has its historical .flesh.- national, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural… In consequence, a people- not as an abstract concept from liturgical manuals of sociology, but as a totality of historical persons who share a common practice of life- forms the historical flesh of the Church, the flesh of the Gospel of Salvation.
All of this is to say the Church is ultimately the gathering of hypostases into a communion with God in which without confusion (without losing their cultural identity, biological, historical, etc.) they become identified as children of God. Panagiotis Nellas writes that the,
“Divine Liturgy brings together… the relations of human beings between themselves,” and that, “its Eucharistic character makes the faithful accept life, their fellow human beings, the fruits of their labors, nature itself, as gifts that they then give to each other and that all offer up to God.”
(To learn more about Pikionis: http://www.pikionisaixoni.com/gallery-it-c#!__welcome-en)
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