CHURCH AND SYMBOLS

December 1994

The Christian Church was revealed – and is constantly being revealed – by the one God, the almighty creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. These revelations are evident through the human nativity of the consubstantial Word of God. The Church has crossed the narrow confines of Palestine and the Mosaic Law and has ventured out to encounter and dialogue with the world of the Gentiles. Since the beginning, the Church did not hesitate to embrace all that the divine creator had made in His infinite providence and love. Through the life of doxological worship, particularly through the supreme expression of the divine Eucharist, the very emblems of the Gentile divinities were returned to their natural purity and a new symbolism emerged: the Christocentric reality of the cosmos and nature.

In the catacombs of ancient Rome, Christ was portrayed as a pure white lamb, as a fish or as a vine. The four Evangelists were represented by an angel, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. The Holy Spirit was depicted as a dove ever since the Baptism of Jesus Christ in the River Jordan. With the passage of time, the Church became even more audacious in making use of nature’s symbols in order to decorate the space where the faithful worshipped. The church interior, in fact liturgy itself, became a miniature icon of the universe, of heaven, of earth, of the nether world and of the world to come. We can begin, therefore, to understand the concepts of sacred space and sacred time.

Environment and Sin

While the plenitude of theological vision in Jesus Christ allows the highest doxological offering of the universe to the almighty, the thoughtless and abusive treatment of even the smallest material and living creation of God must be considered a mortal sin. An insult toward the natural creation is seen as – and in fact actually is – an unforgivable insult to the uncreated God.

At this particular juncture, the Christian Church, and especially the Orthodox Church, turns its attention toward the land of the Rising Sun and the delicate sensitivity of the spiritual vision of nature found in Buddhism, which has shaped the consciences and souls of the noble Japanese race. It is extremely significant that the Church observes in Japanese life, particularly in its expression of art, an overwhelming preponderance of the beauty and grace of God’s creation and the profound respect for it. So often, there is a hardly susceptible mysterious element of intuitiveness of the temporality of the subjects portrayed. Indeed, the realization that the entire visible world has a finite existence, that “it fades like a flower.” Is for all of us the beginning of the most existential inner searching about what succeeds death.

Orthodoxy has its response: “resurrection from the dead,” “new creation,” and “a better and enduring existence” (Heb. 10.34). For, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3.20). Nevertheless, the mystery of creation can be appreciated only in faith, without which true knowledge of God would be absolutely unobtainable. This faith has been delivered given “once for all” (Jude 3) as creation itself was created once for all.