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 13