Liturgy as Icon: Public Witness in a Pluralistic World

The Catholic Theological Society in America
June 11, 2000, San Jose, California
David W. Fagerberg
Concordia College
901 South 8th St., Moorhead, MN
fagerber@cord.edu

If an ant could be induced to go inside a balloon, then the ant could view that balloon internally. But if one watched a balloon bounce around the room, off the ceiling and walls and desktop, then one would view the balloon externally. It seems to me that the liturgy is viewed internally in most discussions. That is, the boundary of the ecclesiastical rite is paced off, and then attention is only given to what goes on inside that border. That is partly the fault of liturgiologists who play ring around the altar with rubrics and ritual, and partly the fault of theologians who spurn liturgical theology and relegate liturgy to the practical section of the curriculum along with how to chant and lead successful stewardship strategies. Since liturgy is guided by rubric, and is an instance of ritual, this is not necessarily a false perspective, only an incomplete one, like the ant has a real perspective on a balloon but not necessarily a complete one. I am therefore pleased for the opportunity to view liturgy externally, under the conference theme "Catholicism and the Public Life" and consider the profane effects of a sacred liturgy bouncing off the walls.(1)

Let me express my thesis by a spatial image consisting of three parts, which I will first state very succinctly for the purpose of accenting the metaphor, and then elaborate upon them. First, public life used to take place within the Church, which is what was meant by Christendom. Second, public life no longer takes place within the Church, which is what was meant by the end of Christendom, and so some people think the Church should now insinuate itself into the world. Third, I agree with the historical fact in number two, but not with the remedy, and so will argue that the place of liturgy is not in the world, but before it. Liturgy stands vis-à-vis public life.

Now let me repeat myself. First, I said medieval Christendom strove to bring public life within the Church and place society under Christian organization. European Christendom supposed "the existence of a temporal community essentially composed of Christian citizens alone. That is the first form of Christian State ever effectively contemplated."(2) The sacred encompassed the profane. Public life depended upon a social unity that came from common values which were so correlated with Christianity that "the notion . . . of visible membership of the Church, [entered] into the very definition of citizen."(3) Second, I said public life no longer takes place within an ecclesiastical framework, and this is referred to as the end of Christendom. It was a tumultuous affair.

[It] could hardly have been effected without a crisis. The end of a Christendom, if it is neither the end of the Church nor the end of the world, will certainly appear as the end of a world, and the birth of another. The crisis was in fact terrible. Instead of evolving normally towards a secular Christendom, medieval Christendom was ravaged by the wars of religion, by the disastrous error of theological liberalism, by the establishment of a regime of separation between the Church and the State, and lastly by the ideologies of Communism and Racism.(4)

So now the profane seems to encompass the sacred. The situation seems to have been inverted, leading a few nostalgic souls to wish they could revive Unam Sanctum at least culturally, but many more to conclude that if there's no going back, then Catholicism will have to adopt guerilla strategies within the secular culture which swamped it. Standing like an oasis, the liturgy must somehow introduce God to the vast spiritual desert around it. My third point, you recall, was that I disagree with this strategy, although I agree with the historic fact that we're not in Kansas any more.

I disagree with this strategy because, as my teacher Fr. Aidan Kavanagh used to say, contrary to what many Christians think, God works on both sides of the Church-world equation. The faith of the Church in motion (which was how Kavanagh defined liturgy) does not exist for the purpose of introducing God into godless places. But if the task of the Church is not to inoculate a godless world by sacramental syringes, then what is the relationship between the Catholic Church and public life? That is our question, and I submit it is a liturgical question, and so I turn to liturgical theology for an answer. I do not mean that we should make up our theological minds first and then rummage through a historical slag pile of liturgical practice for evidence; I mean that we should turn to a liturgical praxis which is a theological expression of the Christian understanding of the sacred-profane relationship. If public life since the end of Christendom is no longer lived within the Church, and if the Catholic task (I mean, the task of being Catholic in a secular world) is not to interject God into an otherwise godless sphere, then I submit that the Catholic task in post-Christendom consists of being a liturgical icon facing the profane world. This is the liturgy's public witness in a pluralistic world.

Charles Journet, from whom I have been quoting the above descriptions of medieval Christendom, claims that although this was the first form of Christendom contemplated, it was not destined to last forever. Neither is it the only structure of Christendom possible. (5) Journet defines Christendom as a "cultural complex which [Christ's Church] maintains and inspires, a Christian civilization, a Christian world. In this sense there are two possible realizations--not univocal, but proportional and analogical--of the idea of Christendom, two specifically distinct types of Christendom: the consecrational and the secular."(6) Consecrational Christendom was the purpose of the middle ages when membership in the Church entered into the very definition of citizen, but the state of things has changed, and now a secular Christendom is developing in which "Christian values affect the political order from without, to sustain, enlighten, and sublimate it; the notion of Christianity, of visible membership of the Church, remains outside the definition of the citizen ...."(7) What caused Christendom's transformation from the consecrational to the secular type? Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx suggests it was Christianity itself.

Schillebeeckx acknowledges that secularization is usually taken to mean a loss of God, but he disagrees, saying that secularization in fact means "a changed experience of the world and of [our] own existence . . . In confrontation with this world, man is discovered as the subject ...."(8) In other words, secularization is less a change in humanity's attitude toward the deity, than it is a change in humanity's attitude toward the world. Nature is no longer encountered as a transcendent, divine force (benevolent or malicious), but has become the arena for our humanization. And the catalyst behind this changed view of nature "is not a kind of necessary evil forced on believing man as it were from the outside .... It is rather an inner consequence of yahwism and of christianity and therefore also an inner aspect of the historical evolution of christianity itself," and "we can see this process of desacrilisation taking place in the whole history of christianity."(9) The true theological consequence of secularisation, therefore, is a change of nature "from being the subject to being the object of man's control. Man has, for his part, discovered his own being as a subject. This change from cosmocentrism to anthropocentrism means that the once theophanous world has now become a hominised world, in the positive or the negative sense."(10)

In this respect, Schillebeeckx portrays secularisation as the outcome and ally of the Church's expanded self-understanding. It is too tiny an ecclesiology to make the Church coextensive with even the greatest perimeter ever reached by consecrational Christendom, because the theatre of Christian liturgy is the cosmos, not a shrine. This theatre includes all history, all cultures, even both the visible and invisible creation. As Erik Peterson writes, "The worship of the Church is not the liturgy of a human religious society, connected with a particular temple, but worship which pervades the whole universe and in which sun, moon, and all the stars take part .... [T]he Church is no purely human religious society. The angels and saints in heaven belong to her as well. Seen in this light, the Church's worship is no merely human occasion. The angels and the entire universe take part in it."(11) From the very start, then, Christian liturgy was cosmological and eschatological, not sectarian and seasonal. Therefore, Schillebeeckx says, for Christianity "Religion is not an attitude towards 'God,' but an attitude toward the totality of reality and the promise for man in the world," and the Church as sacrament is commissioned to make "historically visible and present what is already implicitly active in the whole community of men, but is still looking for an explicit, concrete form."(12)

This means, in other words, that 'the world' is, in the contemporary saving situation of the incarnation, implicit christianity--a distinctive, non-sacral, but sanctified expression of man's living community with the living God--while the church, as the institution of salvation with her communal confession of faith, her worship and her sacraments, is the 'set aside', sacral expression of this implicit christianity. Speaking about the church's relationship with the world is therefore not a dialogue between what is distinctive to christianity and what is alien to christianity, between the religious and the profane, between what is supranatural and what relates strictly to this world. It is, on the contrary, a dialogue . . . between the two complementary forms of experience of the one christianity, a dialogue between the set aside, sacral expression by the church of the theologal life of those who explicitly believe and the secular expression that has not been set aside, within the world, of the same life of faith."(13)

Underscoring this point, I shall note that liturgical tradition has understood both the Church building and the Divine Liturgy to be microcosmic.

Microcosm does not mean a fraction of the whole (a kitchen is not the microcosm of a house), it means that everything which can be found in the whole can be found on a smaller order (a dollhouse with kitchen, bedroom & bathroom is the microcosm of a house). Liturgy is microcosmic because in it can be found everything that can be found in the entire cosmos: earth and heaven, matter and spirit, the visible and invisible, creature and human and angel, and Creator. At one point in his mystagogy on the Church, St. Maximus the Confessor explains the symbolism of the Church building, divided into sanctuary and nave, by regarding it as an image of the world. But Maximus insists that the Church images the whole world, not just a part of it.(14) Even though the Church is divided into sanctuary (which symbolizes the invisible, spiritual world) and nave (which symbolizes the visible, sensible world) nevertheless the Church, just like the cosmos, "is one in its basic reality without being divided into its parts by reason of the differences between them." Rather, says Maximus, the relationship of the parts to the unity "shows to each other that they are both the same thing, and reveals that one is to the other in turn what each one is for itself." And what does the sanctuary reveal about the nave? and the nave about the sanctuary? "Thus, the nave is the sanctuary in potency by being consecrated by the relationship of the sacrament toward its end, and in turn the sanctuary is the nave in act by possessing the principle of its own sacrament."(15)

The world is the Church in potency, and the Church is the world in act. "In its deepest understanding," writes Olivier Clement, "the Church is nothing other than the world in the course of transfiguration . . .."(16) Or in the words of Fr. Godfrey Diekmann, "

the world is our means of worship, and our use of these means . . . reveals the inherent and ultimate meaning of the world, the fulfilment of its destiny . . .. Water, all water, can be called holy because it is a sacrament, a sign of God's power and beauty and love. Blessing water, or using it in liturgy, simply reveals more convincingly the fulfillment of water's intrinsic sacramentality. Liturgical word and sacrament are, so to speak, the intensification, the visible concentration of what is already incipiently present.(17)

The evangelical charge to Christianity is not to pave the world into a Church parking lot, but to be sign and instrument (icon and sacrament) so the world may realize its principal meaning. And the principle meaning of the world's existence, says Leonid Ouspensky, lies in the "participation of the world in building the Kingdom of God (depending, of course, on its free will) . . .. And inversely, the principal meaning of the existence in the world of the Church itself is the work of drawing this world into the fullness of the revelation--its salvation."(18) Therefore, sacraments are not a means to conjure up God, as if God is only in the temple (fanis) and not in the world (profanis). Instead "Sacraments constitute the manifestation of the holiness and the redeemed state of the secular dimension of human life and of the world," according to Fr. Karl Rahner. "Man does not enter a temple, a fane which encloses the holy and cuts it off from a godless and secular world which remains outside. Rather in the free breadth of a divine world he erects a landmark, a sign of the fact that this entire world belongs to God . . .."(19) Or, as Fr. Kavanagh used to say, liturgy is doing the world the way it was meant to be done.

This liturgical cosmology depends upon an eschatology which believes everything is destined for glory, and an anthropology which believes the image of God can attain the likeness of God (which is deification), and a Christology which believes the Kingdom of God has begun, and an ecclesiology which believes the Church visualizes the potency of the world. When I say the Church visualizes the world's potency I do not mean that Christians close their eyes and form a mental image of heads with halos and souls with wings. I mean the Church-in-motion (that is, the Divine Liturgy) makes visible the transfiguration worked by supernatural grace. Adding the suffix "-ize" turns a noun or adjective into a verb, in the sense of "causing it to be or become." To sanitize is to make sanitary, to jeopardize is to put into jeopardy, and to visual-ize the Kingdom of God is to make spiritual reality symbolic and material and sacramental. The Divine Liturgy materializes the Kingdom of God as Jesus' flesh materialized the Logos.(20)

The capacity for this, I say, is implicit in liturgical anthropology as well as liturgical cosmology. Adam and Eve were created in original justice to see the world in both a physical light and, by supernatural grace, in a spiritual light. St. Symeon the New Theologian writes,

Know then that you are double
and that you possess two eyes,
the sensible and the spiritual.
Since there are also two suns
there is also a double light,
sensible and spiritual,
and if you see them, you will be the man
as you were created in the beginning to be.
If you see the sensible sun
and not the spiritual sun,
you are really half dead.(21)

Because sin put a cataract in one eye, an iconostasis is required between the nave and the sanctuary to reveal creation in the light of Mt. Tabor. "Our natural faculties are not sufficient to allow us to perceive the spiritual. That is why Christ united human energy to divine and deifying energy. The senses are spiritualized and become like the object they are sensing."(22) We become like the object we are sensing, so God became human to be sensible. The Word became incarnate so we could become like the prototype we perceive. God became human so humanity might be made divine. The human-ization of God (I'm still being conscious of the "ize" suffix) is therefore the foundation of Church, the fundament of liturgy, and the canon of iconography. Because incarnate God, therefore iconic Church. That is why the kontakion for the Triumph of Orthodoxy, composed to celebrate the feast of the restoration of icons in 843, contains a concise summary of the entire economy of salvation.

No one could describe the Word of the Father;
But when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos,
He consented to be described,
And restored the fallen image to its former state by uniting it to divine beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images.

In these five lines we hear the doctrines of divine apophasis, the hypostatic union in Mary's womb, God's kenosis, humanity's deification, and the evangelical charter of the Church to be iconic celebrant of Christ's mysteries historically perpetuated.

The Church-at-liturgy is an icon of the world's transfiguration because the Holy Spirit brings "the eschata into history. He confronts the proceeds of history with its consummation, with its transformation and transfiguration . . . [T]he Church's anamnesis acquires the eucharistic paradox . . . the memory of the future."(23) This consummation is to be proclaimed not only to those who live within the Church, but also to those who live without the Church. (Whether people are living without the Church since the end of consecrational Christendom is precisely the question we're investigating.) The Church stands as an icon, confronting people with their potential holiness, like a mirror which shows the memory of their beatitude. Romano Guardini speaks of the Church as "the spiritual locality where the individual finds himself face to face with the Absolute; the power that effects and maintains this confrontation." (24) It is as if the Church is the other pole needed by the world in order to create the tension out of which the human arises. What is the Church? Guardini asks. "She is the Kingdom of God in mankind." What is the Kingdom? "The Kingdom of God means that the Creator takes possession of His creature [and] penetrates it with His light . . .. This union of man with God is God's Kingdom."(25) And how does it happen? "God takes possession of mankind as such . . .. If this whole is to be laid hold upon by God, it is not necessary that all men should be numerically included in it. It is sufficient that God's grace should take hold of the community as such, that something which transcends the individual. This, however, can be accomplished in a small representative group. The little flock at Pentecost was already 'mankind' . . .."(26)

An icon is not a natural image neither is it an abstract representation of glory; an icon is an image of glorified nature. "The icon does not represent the divinity. Rather, it indicates man's participation in the divine life."(27) But to participate in that divine life is a task to be accomplished by grace. In a fascinating synchronism of metaphysics, theology and iconic technique, Pavel Florensky uses the categories of face, countenance, and mask to explain image and likeness. "The Holy Tradition of the Church explained that the image of God must be understood as the ontologically actual gift of God, as the spiritual ground of each person; whereas the likeness of God must be understood as the potentiality to attain spiritual perfection."(28) Face is that which we see in ordinary consciousness and is the recognizable appearance of the real world (seen by the sensible sun alone, in St. Symeon's terms); mask is the very opposite of countenance in that it resembles a face but has no metaphysical substance, so actively lies to us; but "countenance" is a face which has realized likeness to God. We behold a countenance, then,

whenever we have before us a face that has fully realized within itself its likeness to God: and we then rightly say, Here is the image of God, meaning: Here is depicted the prototype of Him. When we contemplate this holy countenance, we thus behold the divine prototype; for those among us who have transfigured their faces into countenances proclaim - without a word and solely by their appearance to us - the mysteries of the invisible world.(29)

The Church is the countenance of the world.

An icon reaches its goal, says Florensky, when it leads our consciousness out into the spiritual realm where we behold mysterious and supernatural visions.(30) The Church at Divine Liturgy does not exist to provide an escape from the world, or because it confuses Rome with the heavenly Jerusalem, or because God is only conjured in the temple. Liturgy faces the world iconically. It tells the world the truth about itself: that self-sufficiency is a lie, that humanity was made for community, that humanity was made for deification, that beauty is ambiguous, that a person is more than the mask he or she wears, that the image of God we are by creation must pass through the cross in order to become a countenance,(31) that the spiritual is constitutive to creation. "If an artist in depicting a magnet were to be satisfied with showing merely the visible aspect . . . then he would be depicting not a magnet but merely a piece of steel; the real essence of the magnet - that is, its force-field - would go not only unrepresented but also unindicated."(32) If we were to be satisfied with depicting a person apart from supernatural relations, then we would be showing merely the visible aspect of the person, the mask he or she wears, that part which is socially constructed, or biologically determined, or culturally fabricated . . . but we would not see the person any more than the magnet. An icon is an image of humanity in which the divine energies can be seen radiating out like magnetic fields.

Beauty is the splendor of truth, said Plato; and splendor, adds Paul Evdokimov, "is inherent in truth which does not exist in the abstract. In its fullness, truth requires a personalization and seeks to be enhypostazied, that is, rooted and grounded in a person."(33) The beauty of Jesus is the splendor of God, and the Church is an icon of Jesus' splendor repeated in each glorified face. Gennadios Limouris says,

The icon, then, is the Christ, the God who became a face. Then it is also the faces of all the friends of God who are our friends and who insist on including us in their circle. And already, the icon represents the Kingdom of God; anticipating the Kingdom of God, starting from the one place where we see this already anticipated: here on earth in the human face! The Kingdom of God is anticipated, either starting from the beauty of the world, though this is an ambiguous beauty, or starting from certain faces, certain old faces, fashioned by a long life, faces which have not been plunged into resentment or bitterness or the fear of death, faces of those who do not flinch as they approach death, faces that know precisely where they are, and have found again the mind of a child.(34)

The Church must fundamentally be an icon of the resurrection before the world.

And since the nature which Christ unified with human nature is a triune one, therefore growing into the likeness of God possesses a social dimension. St. Maximus held that "holy Church bears the imprint and image of God since it has the same activity as he does by imitation and in figure." Because heaven is a populous place, as Dante's Mystic Rose reminds us, therefore the Church-icon is corporate. The unity put on display by consecrational Christendom will not again be seen, but it is still incumbent on the Church to be an icon of catholic unity vis-à-vis secular Christendom's diverse, pluralistic, and multiform communities.

It is in this way that the holy Church of God will be shown to be working for us the same effects as God, in the same way as the image reflects its archetype. For numerous and of almost infinite number are the men, women, and children who are distinct from one another and vastly different by birth and appearance, by nationality and language, by customs and age, by opinions and skills, by manners and habits, by pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation, fortune, characteristics, and connections: All are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in the Spirit . . .. Thus, as has been said, the holy Church of God is an image of God because it realizes the same union of the faithful with God. As different as they are by language, places, and customs, they are made one by it through faith.(35)

Pavel Florensky quotes the occasion when Jesus commanded his disciples to "Let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven" (Matt 5:16). And so the saints did! In the 5th century Egyptian desert:

Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said: "Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation, and quiet: and as far as I can I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?" Then the old man rose, and spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers shone like ten candles: and he said: "If you will, you could become a living flame."(36)

or in the 19th century Russian forest:

Then Father Seraphim took me very firmly by the shoulders and said: "We are both in the Spirit of God now, my son. Why don't you look at me?"

I replied: "I cannot look, Father, because your eyes are flashing like lightning. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain."

Father Seraphim said: "Don't be alarmed, your Godliness! Now you yourself have become as bright as I am. You are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God yourself; otherwise you would not be able to see me as I am."(37)

When Jesus says "'Your good works,'" Florensky continues, "this is not 'good works' in the Russian understanding of the words - i.e., not philanthropy and moralism - but rather it is emon ta kala erga, literally, 'the works of your beauty . . .'"(38) The world does not need the Church to teach it morality. The Church saves like Jesus did--by personifying a transfiguring beauty which stirs the appetite for resurrection and creates a philokalic love. "Eschatology sets before us the magnificent definition of what a Christian is: '. . . all those who have longed for his appearing' (2 Tim 4:8) . . . The destiny of the world hangs on the inventive and creative attitude of the Church, on its ability to present the Gospel message so that all men will welcome it."(39) The Church does not save the world by moral pedagogy, but by attraction. Salvation in secular Christendom is erotic.

Endnotes

1. My use of "sacred" here intends to mean "set aside" in the way Joseph Pieper defines the word. "[W]ithin the world's total framework of space and time, accessible to man, there do exist specific exceptional and separated spaces and times, distinct from the ordinary . . .. Even a merely superficial consultation of appropriate dictionaries will show this. Hagios, for example, the Greek term for 'holy,' implies its opposite, koinos (average, common, ordinary). And the precinct dedicated to the gods, containing temple or altar, is called temenos, meaning 'carved out' from the common public domain. The Latin verb sancire, the root of sanctus (holy, sacred), also means 'to fence off, to circumscribe'." Joseph Pieper, In Search of the Sacred (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 13.

2. Charles Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol 1: The Apostolic Hierarchy (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955) 302.

3. Journet, 215. Because citizenship was based on Christian membership, the state was invoked to discipline threats to either citizenship (in the form of criminals) or Christianity (in the form of heresy). Journet spends pp. 222 to 297 discussing the punitive powers of the state exercised on behalf of the Church in the form of crusades, inquisitions, and punishment of heretics. The violence cannot be excused, but neither can it be understood if we anachronistically apply our secular model upon the consecrational model.

4. Journet, 220.

5. That this was the first way a Christendom was conceived came from the expectations the Roman Empire held regarding the relationship between religion and public life, argues Joseph Lecler, S.J. in The Two Sovereignties (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952). He says it was the doctrine of the Incarnation which brought about the distinction between Church and State. The classic study which showed the union of religion with public life in Greece and Rome, to the embarrassment of the eighteenth century deism which assumed these cultures were built on reason alone, is Fustel de Coulanges'The Ancient City, 1864.

6. Journet, 214.

7. Journet, 214.

8. Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, World and Church (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1966) 80.

9. Schillebeeckx, 86, 87.

10. Schillebeeckx, 80.

11. Erik Peterson, The Angels and the Liturgy (New York; Herder & Herder, 1964), p. 22, 50. Chesterton made the point by saying, "Christianity is not a religion; it is a Church." Where All Roads Lead, G. K. Chesterton Collected Works, vol 3 (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1990) 52.

12. Schillebeeckx, 89, 92.

13. Schillebeeckx, 101-2. The compatibility, if not identity, between Schillebeeckx's "implicit Christianity" and Fr. Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christianity" is obvious.

14. Perhaps what is so frustrating in current discussions about American Catholic liturgical architecture is the absence of this microcosmic sense. Against one side having to all appearances abandoned the need for sacred space, the phrase domus Dei has been restored but sometimes in a context which seems to signal the Church as a hideaway for God on the surface of a profane planet. To remember that the domus Dei, as microcosm, includes the world in its symbolism might serve to open up the conversation.

15. Maximus the Confessor, "The Church's Mystagogy" in Maximus Confessor Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 188. Italics added. A treatment on this subject by someone who knows Maximus' mind very well is "Apophatic Theology and the Liturgy of St. Maximos the Confessor," by Andrew Louth, Criterion: A Publication of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Autumn 1997, Vol 36, No. 3, 2-9, and printed also with three other essays in The Wisdom of the Byzantine Church: Evagrios of Pontos and Maximos the Confessor, the 1997 Paine Lectures in Religion, University of Missouri-Columbia.

16. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (New York: New York City Press, 1996) 95

17. Fr. Godfrey Diekmann, "Celebrating the Word," Celebrating the Word: The third symposium of the Canadian Liturgical Society (Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1977) p. 19.

18. Leonid Ouspensky, "The Meaning and Language of Icons," in The Meaning of Icons, ed. by Ouspensky & Lossky (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982) 28.

19. Fr. Karl Rahner, "The Person in the Sacramental Event," Theological Investigations 14 (New York: Seabury Press, 1979) 169. Fr. Louis Bouyer credits the appearance of the profane with exactly this dissection. Modern persons often think "reality was from the first profane and in order to have something sacred it was first necessary to take hold of that which was profane and consecrate it. The truth, however, is the very opposite to this rather smug opinion. In fact, it is the profane that has come into being through a desecration of the sacred. Human beings circumscribe a limited area in this reality as their own to the exclusion of God. At this moment the profane makes its appearance. The more firmly [persons] establish themselves in the world as their own home, the more this area of the profane is extended. Moreover, the farther they extend the boundaries of their own piece of ground, the less interest they take in the rest." Rite and Man (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963) p. 78.

20. The same Logos who Justin Martyr says was at work in the world antecedent to his realization. "Christ is the first-born of God, his Logos, in whom all people share. That is what we have learned and what we bear witness to . . .. All who have lived in accordance with the Logos are Christians, even if they have been reckoned atheists, as among the Greeks Socrates, Heraclitus and the like." Apology 1,46.

21. St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love, translated by George A. Maloney, SJ (Denville: Dimension Books) 123.

22. Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Redondo Beach: Oakwood Publications, 1990) 28.

23. John Zizioulas, "Apostolic Continuity and Orthodox Theology: Towards a Synthesis of Two Perspectives," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 19 (1975) 2:83.

24. Romano Guardini, The Church and the Catholic (New York: Sheed & Ward Inc. 1953) 58.

25. Guardini, 33.

26. Guardini, 34. Journet states explicitly the conclusion of such an idea. "Consequently, we have to recognize two categories of the saved. The first, invested with the sacramental characters, are able to participate in the very exercise of the redemptive cultus; the others, lacking the sacramental characters, can participate only in the satisfactory effects of the Christian cultus, and that in a measure inevitably incomplete. The first are saved inasmuch as, united to Christ, they continue to offer the redemptive sacrifice for all men of their generation; the second are saved inasmuch as the redemptive sacrifice continues to be offered for them by Christ and the Christians of their generation" (p 60).

27. Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, vol 1(Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1992) 166. The tenth chapter, "The Meaning and Content of the Icon" is the finest correlation between the theological basis and the artistic canons of iconography.

28. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996) 51.

29. Florensky, 52.

30. Florensky, 66.

31. A process I have chosen to call "liturgical asceticism." Cf "A Century on Liturgical Asceticism," Diakonia, Volume 31, Number 1, 1998, 31-60.

32. Florensky, 127.

33. Evdokimov, 24.

34. Gennadios Limouris, "The Microcosm and Macrocosm of the Icon: Theology, Spirituality and Worship in Colour," in Icons, Windows on Eternity, compiled by Gennadios Limouris (Geneva: WCC Publications, Faith and Order Paper 147, 1990) 119.

35. Maximus the Confessor, 187.

36. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers in Western Asceticism, ed. Owen Chadwick (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1958) 142.

37. The account of Motovilov's experience with St. Seraphim, found in Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, St. Seraphim of Saraov: A Spiritual Biography (Blanco: New Sarov Press, 1994) 196.

38. Florensky, 56.

39. Evdokimov, 63.