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Note: these excerpt threads are
subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority
permits
Mystagogy: Cultivation of the Heart of God
& Acquisition of the Mind of Christ
Steven Covington: "Greek in origin, the word mystagogy is sometimes translated as savoring the mysteries or educating one in the mysteries or leading the one who is initiated. Used first by the pagan cults of Greece and Rome, mystagogy was a way to secretly initiate and inculturate new members. In the pagan mystagogies, experience not doctrine was the key element of getting to know one’s god. There was essentially no theology associated with pagan gods and therefore no need for catechesis before or after one joined a cult. In the Greek pagan cults of Demeter, Mithra, and Dionysius for instance, initiates would re-enact events in the lives of the gods through ritualistic feasts and orgies receiving in essence a share in the lives of the gods through the highly sensual and psychic ceremonies. While ancient Christians frowned on the cultic practices of the pagans, they felt comfortable borrowing the language if not some of the methods of pagan mystagogy... mystagogy was adapted to Christianity. It allowed bishops to initiate larger numbers of converts into the mysteries while still offering the deeply personal experience of Christ that had been the hallmark of Christian conversion. In fact, because Christianity stressed a pervasive life-changing experience of Christ at the point of conversion, it was well suited for the pagan method of mystagogy... initiation rituals conveyed a reality through which the catechumens would become invested in the life of Christ by experiencing him... the Church Fathers insisted that the rituals of initiation be carried out with a great deal of pomp and solemnity and incorporate sensual evocative symbolism capable of reinforcing the mystery of the experience. The mystagogues introduced heavy doses of typology into their baptismal homilies to show that the events in which the neophytes were participating were foreshadowed in the Old Testament then ordained in the New Testament. The mystagogues created a rich liturgical symbolism that positioned the sacramental experiences of the converts squarely within the salvific progression designed by God. In addition to being a way to know Christ mystagogy was also a way of learning to live as Christ. The fourth-century bishops used mystagogical theology to call the new Christians to a radical conversion of life a new state of consciousness that caused the neophytes to examine everything with the eyes and mind of Christ..." The Old Is New Again: RCIA Stephen Fowl: "From the time of John Cassian, the Church subscribed to a theory of the fourfold sense of scripture. The literal sense of scripture could and usually did nurture the three theological virtues, but when it did not, the exegete could appeal to the three additional spiritual senses... This hermeneutical device made it possible for the Church to pray directly and without qualification even a troubling Psalm like 137. After all, Jerusalem was not merely a city in the Middle East, it was, according to the allegorical sense, the Church; according to the tropological sense, the faithful soul; and according to the anagogical sense, the center of God's new creation. The Psalm became a lament of those who long for the establishment of God's future kingdom and who are trapped in this disordered and troubled world, which with all its delights is still not their home. They seek an abiding city elsewhere. The imprecations against the Edomites and the Babylonians are transmuted into condemnations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you grant the fourfold sense of scripture, David sings like a Christian... Medieval exegetes admit that the words of scripture had a meaning in the historical situation in which they were first uttered or written, but they deny that the meaning of those words is restricted to what the human author thought he said or what his first audience thought they heard. The stories and sayings of scripture bear an implicit meaning only understood by a later audience... The language of the Bible opens up a field of possible meanings. Any interpretation which falls within that field is valid exegesis of the text, even though that interpretation was not intended by the author. Any interpretation which falls outside the limits of that field of possible meanings is probably eisegesis and should be rejected as unacceptable. Only by confessing the multiple sense of scripture is it possible for the Church to make use of the Hebrew Bible at all or to recapture the various levels of significance in the unfolding story of creation and redemption..." [29-31] The Theological Interpretation of Scripture Peter Leithart: "Though medieval writers used pagan and classical literature in various ways, the book that formed the foundation of medieval society was the Bible. From the time of Origen and Augustine, every area of study was important because it could shed light on the biblical text. Monasteries, centers of medieval intellectual and cultural life, were devoted to copying Scripture, copying commentaries on Scripture, chanting Scripture... Without denying the historicity of any of the events recounted in Scripture, medieval writers also insisted that Scripture has a richness and fullness of meaning; not a bare record of historical events. Everything in Scripture points forward ... and upward ... speaks not only of the universe as a whole ... but also of the human soul... For all its horror, Hell is a revelation not only of God's justice and His wisdom. Hell is a creation of the Father's power, the Son's wisdom, and the Spirit's love. For modern people, this sounds preposterous. How could love construct a place where one man eats the brains of another? In this reaction, modern readers are not alone. Dante asks himself similar questions many times during his journey through Hell, and he reacts to the punishments he witnesses with horror and pity. Unlike moderns, however, Dante believed that if Hell made no sense to him, the flaw must be in him, not in hell itself, much less in God. If he cannot yet see justice and love at work, it is because he has not learned to see properly. He does not begin with a proper understanding of love; he must undergo an ascent to love, an ascent that requires renewed vision..." [20-23] Ascent to Love: Dante's Divine Comedy Daniel Mitsu: "When Christians emerged from the catacombs to openly profess their faith without the constraints imposed by persecution, they formulated the truths that they had received from the Apostles in dogma, liturgy, monachism, exegesis, mysticism, and iconography... The method with which the Church Fathers read Holy Scripture was especially symbolic; in the Old Testament, they saw Christ allegorically indicated in every sentence...Through symbolic exegesis, patristic and mediaeval theologians found in Holy Scripture an inexhaustible source of wisdom. The inspired words were likened to the miraculously multiplying loaves and fishes..." Loss, Archaeology, & Recovery "The Catholic mentality has long been plagued by an excessive literalism in regarding its own traditions. It is a problem that worsened about the time of the Reformation due not only to the Reformers but to the reaction to them - the reaction of Catholics worrying too much about not scandalizing Protestants. The result was that Catholics themselves began to think like Protestants rejecting the mediaeval vision that saw the world in four senses... To the extent that we now speak of the four senses at all, it is not to imitate the exegesis of the fathers who saw Christ in every word of the Old Testament or the mediaevals who saw Christ in every word of everything... The hermeneutic that we apply to our devotional, liturgical and iconographic language need not be that which Protestants apply... There is no need for our devotional, liturgical and iconographic language to be true in an exclusively historical sense." Legend & Apocrypha Hans Urs von Balthasar: "But today, presented with a single river, we see in these streams nothing other than the river's tributaries, rushing headlong to meet it and merging completely, in the fullness of time, with the uniqe Word which says everything. It is impossible to listen to any individual word of God without hearing the Son who is the Word. Moreover, it is futile to leaf through the writings of the Old and New Covenants in the hope of coming across truths of one kind or another, unless we are prepared to be exposed to a direct encounter with him, with this personal, utterly free Word which makes sovereign claims upon us... He gathers up all the words of God scattered throughout the world and concentrates them in himself, the intense focus of revelation... there are also the words strewn throughout creation, stammered and whispered; words of nature, in macrocosm and microcosm; the words uttered by the flowers and animals, words of overpowering beauty and of debilitating terror; the words of human existence, in their confusing, myriad forms, laden with both promise and disappointment: all these belong to the one, eternal, living Word who became man for our sakes. They are totally and utterly his possession, and so they are at his disposal, to be understood exclusively in his interpretation... In history's headwaters it was possible to travel to meet him, the great river, on different streams. It was possible for the hearers to accept the 'many and various' words of promise in so open and believing a manner that they were borne along toward the approaching unity. Now that the Son has appeared, the believer must apprehend the multiplicity from the standpoint of the unity. He must continually return to the center, to be sent thence to the periphery of history and nature with all its babel of languages. It is at the center that he learns what is decisive, namely, the truth about his life, what God wants and expects of him, what he should strive for and what he should avoid in the service of the divine Word. Thus he must become a hearer of the word..." [18-20] On Prayer |