Cultural Encounters: A Journal For The Theology Of Culture Volume 10 Number 2 (Summer 2014) | Page 18
LITURGICAL TELEOLOGY
- Augustine
exquisite, teleological poiesis–the flawless pedagogy employed by divine
providence for Adam’s theoformation. Adam and the world are made for
each other. They are each other’s organic necessity for attaining theosis.
Through learn ing to cultivate creation, Adam is to be simultaneously
cultivated in the divine likeness.
It is not accidental that the first creative act of humanity recorded in the
biblical narrative demands the agency of speech. As the divine speech brings
forth the genesis of creation, so human speech inaugurates humanity’s
inspired, liturgical imaging of the divine creativity within the cosmos. Yet,
this creativity is located in the communal dynamics of collaborative
conversation between humanity and God. In the naming of the animals,
Adam speaks forth words as an act of completing through their meaning
what God has created. The human being adds its logoi to the logoi spoken
forth by the one eternal Logos. Thus, human language as creation “coincides
with the very being of things.”31 Adam can name the animals because of the
deep organic connection between humanity and the rest of God’s creatures—
for the human being rises from the earth as a “hypostasis” (and continuity) of
“the terrestrial cosmos.” Thus, as Lossky points out, Adam knows the
animals “from within; he specifies their secret . . . poet as he is priest, poet
for God.”32
As previously established, we can perceive all of creation as means of
communion between humanity and God and between human beings
themselves on the path towards the transfiguration of the human community
into a living icon of the Trinitarian proto-communal life within the visible,
material world. Language, as creation, illustrates this perception in a most
explicit way. Its essence is actualized in communion; for indeed, language
manifests itself only when shared with the other. Then the purpose of
language unveils itself as the means of bonding all of humanity into one
speech community33 united in a creative discourse, cultivating the cosmos
God, vol. 1 of The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (Brookline,
MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005), 4–6.
31. Lossky, Eastern Orthodox Theology, 69.
32. Lossky, Eastern Orthodox Theology, 69.
33. As Jean-François Lyotard reminds us, the translatability of language points to the
fact that all human beings are called to one speech community. Jean-François
Lyotard, “The Other’s Rights,” in On Human Rights, eds. S. Shute and S. Hurley
(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 140–41. This assertion does not imply linguistic
homogeneity but emphasizes that humanity’s communal essence is actualized in
constructive, conversational polyphony of world-building that sustains difference
and heterogeneity, while bringing them into a harmonious whole. For a further
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