The Rended Veil — 2

By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh
Hebrews 10:20

In this essay, we must tackle two points. The first is this: if by the rended veil we mean the inner veil, then God is spilled out upon the world, and man's access to the deepest mysteries of the Divine Nature is, or rather should be, evident and explicit to such a degree that the existence and being of God would be undeniable even to the most hardened atheist. To deny the existence of God, then, would be like denying the existence of the sun in the sky.

Such is patently not the case, and leads to the second point, which is this: if we restrict ourselves to that outer veil, the veil that was wrought by man and not by God (albeit that veil serves a similar purpose and this is inspired by God), then nothing in Christ has substantially changed with regard to humanity's relationship with its creator, the inner veil is still in place and Christ conforms to the means and measure of the Mosaic dispensation.

The veil was torn, and with its tearing marked the fall of the temple and its rebuilding, in the resurrected Christ, of a restored humanity.

St Paul saw all this with such instantaneous clarity the vision struck him blind. In Acts the Apostle of Tarsus is asked, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" (Acts 9:4), St Paul himself never gives a direct account of his vision or the exact nature of his conversion, but it is evident that he saw in persecuting the followers of the man on the cross he was persecuting God. It was this that shaped his vision of man in the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, seen also by the anonymous author of Hebrews who wrote: "a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh," (Hebrews 10:20).

Paul saw two things: He saw Christ in man, without differentiation, and in the same way he saw man undifferentiated in Christ. (This was a view that permeated both the pagan and Christian world right up until the closing of the Middle Ages, and its loss marks the dawn of the Modern Age and the birth of an individualism which far exceeds the notions of antiquity.) It was a point he was to express, forcibly on occasion, time and again in his epistles, "I became all things to all men," (1 Corinthians 9:22) and the converse, "Just as each of us has one body with many members, and not all the members have the same function, so too we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another," (Rom.12:4-5). This last is the key to his Christology and ecclesiology, the one in the many, "and individually members of one another," so that all men are one in Christ and one in the community of the flesh as well as the spirit, so that "with Him, in Him, through Him, by the unity of the Holy Spirit" that last veil, which is ourselves, might be transcended.