Mystagogy

Mystagogy in the Christian Tradition refers to the 50-day period of instruction given to the neophyte, from Easter to Pentecost, to deepen their appreciation of the sacred mysteries in which they would participate as new members of the Church. Without mystagogy, there is the risk that the Christian will cease to grow in faith and understanding, they may drift from the profession of faith, they may find themselves apparently marooned in a spiritual wasteland.
According to Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis:

This basic structure of the Christian experience calls for a process of mystagogy which should always respect three elements:
It interprets the rites in the light of the events of our salvation, in accordance with the Church’s living tradition.
A mystagogical catechesis must also be concerned with presenting the meaning of the signs contained in the rites.
Finally, a mystagogical catechesis must be concerned with bringing out the significance of the rites for the Christian life in all its dimensions.

The Rites of the Church, her Sacraments and Liturgies, are no mere rituals, and “The mature fruit of mystagogy is an awareness that one’s life is being progressively transformed by the holy mysteries being celebrated.”

The Rended Veil — 3

Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away.
2 Corinthians 3:16

"Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection" (St Paul, Hebrews 6:1). What are we to make of this verse, in fact this chapter? Is not perfection to be found in the doctrine itself? To the Apostle of Tarsus, no. There needs be more, and that more was revealed in Christ Jesus, and that more became the entire focus of St Paul's ecclesiology as he plunged ever deeper into the mystery of God.

The domain of principle, and the regimen of its concordant doctrine, comprises the whole world that lay between these two veils, the paroketh and the masak. The spiritual life is a journey from one veil to the other, from ignorance to illumination, from illusion to truth. When observed from this perspective these two veils represent the esoteric and the exoteric dimension respectively, but not exclusively, for the perspective of each changes as the journey progresses. Simply said at the start everything is esoteric, at the end, nothing is hidden. To repeat, the word 'esoteric' itself simply means 'more interior' and whereas the exoteric view of something is its external face, the esoteric is therefore a more interior view, a more perceptive or penetrative view of the same thing, and not, as is commonly understood, a view of something else entirely. It is all a matter of degree that is dependent upon the quality of perception, not the perceived. While on this subject it is perhaps worthwhile to divert, for a paragraph or two, from the main course of this inquiry to investigate a particularly modern phenomena with regard to the proper comprehension of this terminology.

While it is widely acknowledged and understood that an exotericism, being the formal and necessarily doctrinal expression of the truth of revelation, comprises the 'letter of the law' and draws its essence from an esotericism that is its cause and life-engendering source, and which thus comprises the 'spirit of the law' so to speak, the two are, although not equal, nevertheless mutually dependent upon each other. Whilst in principle the esoteric stands above the exoteric as essence over form or spirit over matter, in this wise the esoteric is of itself impervious to any violation of the exoteric, whereas the exoteric is entirely and continuously dependent upon the esoteric for its sustenance, in practice the esoteric requires an exoteric counterpart as its anchor and containment, that is its embodiment and its practice in fact, else the essence 'runs away' like water poured over sand. The two are like a heart and its beat, as it were, and whereas is is easy to see that a heart with no beat is empty and dead, it is harder but no less obvious that the essence that manifests itself as 'beat' can have no life outside of itself without a heart.

It is a common and perniciously erroneous belief of the current age that it is possible to 'abstract' the esoteric from its exoteric and traditional framework; stripped of its formal expression revealed truth is replaced by an entirely subjective and essentially counterfeit ideology that in satiating the sentimental poses as a spiritual life that is determined by neither God nor nature but the wish and whimsey of the moment.

Another no less common (in its own domain) but perhaps a more permissable, or at least understandable error, with regard to Christianity, is the assumption that whilst the esoteric and exoteric dimensions coexist within a given tradition, there is in the esoteric a separate and discrete (by which is meant secret) institutional and sacramental order the grace and gifts of which lie beyond the scope of the common stock. The two then, the esoteric and exoteric, are entirely and necessarily distinct, and the journey then from outer to inner is not one of degree is by invitation and a necessary initiation, whereas the whole message of Christ and the ministry of Jesus (to voice a much-spoken separation between spirit and body) was and is one and the same — Christianity is a religion of conversion, not of initiation, which brings us back on course, after an aparent but nonetheless valid and meaningful excursion, to our main investigation, which is the nature of the veil, and particularly with reference to the passage from the exterior world of the flesh into the interior world of the spirit.

From the superficial image of the manifest world that is woven into the masak, with all its dazzling allure as Josephus testifies, the believer moves along the path of purgation, purification and illumination, toward the subtle treasures of the paroketh. Beyond that inner veil, only the high priest may enter, at the dates and times accorded to him. Within the Holy of Holies, devoid of all decoration, he stands naked before God, for it is a rule that he must divest himself of all his clothes. The place is the void of God in His Infinitude, and before Him the man stands, having shed every vestige of his mortal self to walk in the Presence of Divine Selfhood, stripped to his primordial purity, naked yet unabashed as was his distant ancestor before the Fall.

His nakedness then is a sign, not only of the shedding of his clothes, but in a sense the shedding of all that which lay before this veil, the formal and outward expression of his tradition, in its rites and rituals and regalia, its comforts and its consolations. In effect he has passed beyond the veil of form, of sign, of symbol, and the temple now shines with the 'metaphysical transparency' of his illumination. His eyes are opened and he sees everything made new. That inner veil represents the last form of the world of forms, and the grace of God pours through him and so he sees the essential reality of everything on which he turns his gaze. The outer veil is the veil of the exoteric, it is the surface that is opaque and stops the profane eye. The inner veil is the esoteric, the path to the interior. The two veils represent the letter and the spirit, form and the essence, in effect they are the same veil.

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.

The Rended Veil — 1

And they shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in the midst of them
Exodus 25:8

Tradition has long held that the veil of the temple, referred to in all three synoptic gospels as being torn (Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38 and Luke 23:45) at the moment of Christ's death upon the cross, was that which separated the Holy of Holies, the most sacred and interior part of the temple at Jerusalem, from the Holy or main body of the temple where the liturgical observances took place. Another view, equally as venerable (in Origen, and also St Thomas) holds that the veil referred to was that which stood some 25 metres tall and which hung in front of the main temple doors. Assuming the temple was visible from Golgotha, only its exterior would have been in sight, thus only the outer veil could have been seen. To assume however that the synoptic accounts are of a purely literalist viewpoint closes the door to any symbolic or spiritual significance other than that which is overt and explicit, reducing its meaning to an historical and anecdotal one.

This outer veil, masak, was, as Josephus tells us, was a:
"Babylonian tapestry, with embroidery of blue and fine linen, of scarlet also and purple, wrought with marvelous skill. Nor was this mixture of materials without its mystic meaning: it typified the universe . . . Portrayed on this tapestry was a panorama of the entire heavens . . ."

Josephus' description bears much in common with the inner veil, paroketh, as described in Scripture (Exodus 26:31, 36:35, 2 Chronicles 3:14), so much so that we may assume the two were near enough identical, except in size, which is of course incidental and of no meaning in this context. In fact in the biblical description of the tabernacle (Exodus 25 on) there were no solid walls, it was a portable structure and Moses was directed to make 'hangings' on all four sides. The outer veil can then be seen as the last vestige of these hangings, but as all were made to the same design, the veil and the hangings, or the two veils of the temple, perform the same essential function, each conveyed the same message, the same 'mystic meaning'. Furthermore the outer veil can thus be seen not only as a repetition but intrinsically as a projection or a prolongation of the inner (the first veil), the veil which all others have as principal. Each veil reveals 'a panorama of the entire heavens', and each conceals a mystery, the sacred reality behind it. This relationship of the two veils, one to the other, is the aspect we shall explore in this essay.

The temple traces its origin back to Exodus, "And they shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in the midst of them" (25:8). The exoteric understanding is of a sanctuary as a sacred place, both taking their root from the Greek sacare 'to set aside' and thus denotes a place set aside, by man, for the worship of God. The esoteric dimension of 'sanctuary' is that within it one is outside of ordinary time and space. The veil was made: "According to all the likeness of the tabernacle which I will shew thee" (25:9), and thus is an earthly or physical manifestation of a spiritual reality. The veil bore an mage of the cosmos, which tells us that it marked the separation between Creator and His creation. What lay beyond this veil lay beyond the created order, it was a 'sanctuary' miqdash in which God could reside in order to be known, and from where "I will appear to thee, and I will commune with thee" (Exodus 25:22).

Like the tabernacle before it, the temple at Jerusalem functions as God's dwelling place (mishkan) or the holy place of His 'indwelling' (shekhinah) with His people. According to the Talmud (Yoma 54b) In it is found the 'foundation stone' (eben shetiyah) around which the earth was created and upon which the whole world rests. This has its correspondence in many traditions. According to Greek myth Zeus let fly two eagles from opposite ends of the earth, and they flew towards each other and met over the town of Delphi, and this point at which they met was thus determined as the centre of the earth. The point was marked by the Omphalos stone in the temple of Apollo. When Harmonia wove the veil representing the whole universe, she started with the Omphalos stone at the centre and from there worked outward. The Omphalos was not only sacred to Apollo at Delphi but also marked the tomb of the slain and resurrected Dionysus. The Omphalos is also held to be the tomb of Python, the dragon that Apollo slew, and in the stone is often portrayed with a serpent coiled around it. For the Pythagoreans, the Omphalso symbolised the Monad, the seed of the universe. In Egypt their omphalos was the Ben-ben at Heliopolis, the theological centre of their culture, and prototype for the pyramids. Dedicated to the sun, the soul of the sun-god Ra, in the form of the Phoenix, would often alight upon it. There is an Omphalos in Ireland, at Tara, the seat of the High Kings of the Gaels, and the Stone of Scone sat beneath the seat of the kings of Scotland. Of course, there is the Dome of the Rock in Islam. The notion, both of centre, and of foundation, finds its expression in all traditional cultures. In the Kabbala (Zohar: Terumah 157a) the Holy of Holies is the centre of the temple, the temple is the centre of Jerusalem, Jerusalem of The Holy Land and the Holy Land of the world. As foundation of the world the temple stands in direct line of the vertical axis of creation and thus represents the locus of the influence of the Divine, which determines its exterior and functional aspect as spiritual centre for the people of Isreal.

The temple then signified the notion of centre, and in its internal structure realised the vertical or hierarchical axis by a series of three courts, the Divine, the cosmic and the corporeal. In the centre and thus representing the highest point was the Holy of Holies, God in His Isness; the "the deep" of Genesis 1:2, the "I Am That I Am" of Moses, the 'Ground' or 'Gottheit' of Meister Eckart, God in His Inscrutability. Outside or 'below' that was the Holy, wherein stood the symbols of the Jewish Tradition and here was enacted the ceremonies and rituals of the liturgical life. Finally 'below' the Holy was the Outer Court, and it was from here that man commences his journey back to God. Here was the altar and the basin and oral tradition informs us that sacrifice and purification were (and still are) necessary dimensions of spiritual realisation. In the language of symbology the element of sacrifice is fire because it consumes the gross and material and thus releases that which is subtle and of the essence. In the case of washing the symbology once again is obvious, so much so that ritual washing is a powerful element in almost every religious tradition on the planet. The metaphysical symbolism here is that washing signifies a return to a primordial and natural state of purity or innocence.

In closing then, it can be seen that in any and every tradition the temple 'fixes' the relationship between creature and creator in dimensional space. It also 'fixes' this relationship in time, by the procession of its liturgical calendar, and also in eternity, or more accurately in the eternal, in the transcendent, by the remembrance and thus continuance of the given covenant upon which tradition is founded, a contract which springs from the eternal and is the sapiential life and being of the temple itself. This last marks the vertical aspect in its most explicit form and seen in this light the two veils stand one above the other, in a hierarchical relationship, in that the lower, to repeat, is a projection and continuation of the higher in its own domain. The two veils thus separate three worlds; the mundane, the sacred and the Divine, which is reflected in man in corpus, animus, spiritus — body, soul and spirit.

Thoughts on the soul

I think the problem arises when we think of the soul as something — certainly it is a 'thing' of sorts, something that can be lost, can be found, can be saved, but what order of 'thing' is it? The soul, we believe, is immaterial. Its substance is spirit, not matter. But his doesn't really help us. The spirit of a thing is not an empirical category of a thing, but a category of relation. The spirit of a thing cannot be determined by observation of the thing in isolation as itself. If the spirit is immaterial, it cannot be subject to any material measure.

(Although Scripture uses such material determinations in speaking of God, but always in a metaphorical sense, by analogy. God is thus great, good on the one hand, jealous or angry on the other. These determinations call for contemplation within a theological exegesis and epistemology.)

It is observed in the interaction of a thing with other things (even by the reaction of a thing to the withdrawal of all stimuli, in a negative reaction). It is not subject to objective measure or quantitative determination as itself. The spirit of something is an immaterial quality, as we say, the spirit of the occasion cannot be categorically predicated of a particular substance of that occasion. The spirit of a thing then describes not what it is, but how it is.

Scripture says "God (theos) is spirit (pneuma)" (John 4:24). Scripture also says "for love (agape) is of God (theos)" (1 John 4:7)

Old Greek had the verb theoô, but it was only a derivative from theos, and meant "to make someone a theos". The related noun thea meant "a seeing", "a looking at", "a view". Theama meant "that which is seen", "a sight", "a show", "a spectacle". Thus, theaomai (thaomai) meant "to gaze", "to contemplate", "to wonder" and so on. Theaô and theaomai also referred to "being an onlooker", "watching as a spectator".

The word theôros meant, among other things, "a spectator". But, theôroi could also refer to persons who were sent on special missions related to the Greek idol-religion, such as to offer a sacrifice or to consult an oracle. This important latter point will be picked up later, in discussing the two principle aspects of religion as sacrifice.

A theôria meant such things as "a looking at", "a viewing", "a beholding". (Thence the English word "theory", originally with the meaning "a view", referring to the way someone saw or viewed a particular matter.) The related verb theôreô meant "to look at", "to view", "to behold". A theatês was "one who sees". In Christianity, creation is a theophany (from Late Greek theophaneia : Greek theo-, theo- + Greek phainein, phan-, to show".

Theos then might be defined as "he who sees". That agrees quite well with Greek mythology as well; there, the theoi, who were many, were often considered to be "watchers".

The soul is created, breathed in to man: "And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7). The living soul is animated by the breath of God, and man, created in that image and likeness, was made a watcher, a theoi of theos, and set to watch over the earth. To see it as his Creator sees it, as good.

Johann Scottus Eriugena

Too much a philosopher for the theologians, too much a theologian for the philosophers.


Eriugena (800-877) was almost unique in his day for 'having the Greek', and indeed some access to the Greek theological tradition, he knew Gregory of Nyssa (almost unknown in the Latin West), Denys the Areopagite (whom he translated) and Maximus the Confessor.


Eriugena has been called 'the last great Neoplatonist' of the West, and in his "Periphyseon" (The Divisions of Nature) attempted a synthesis of Christian Neoplatonist metaphysics from Eastern and Western sources, drawing on Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Denys and Maximus, as well as Cicero, Martianus Capella, Augustine and Boethius.


What marks Eriugena as supremely relevant today is that he drew a primary division between what is seen and what is unseen, not founded purely on a cosmological hierarchy, but rather determined by the observing intellect.


In Periphyseon, the first and highest cosmic principle is called ‘nature’ (natura) and is said to include both God and creation.


His metaphysic was too conceptually advanced for his contemporaries, The Treatise on Divine Predestination caused quite a stir and lost him more than a few friends. Periphyseon was popular among the philosophers of Chartres and St. Victor (e.g. Hugh of St. Victor refers to it) but was condemned in the thirteenth century, for promoting pantheism, which recently has been questioned and rejected. He enjoyed a clandestine influence on Christian Neoplatonists, including such notables as Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa.


In the last century or so, he has been called a forerunner of speculative idealism, a ‘Proclus of the West’ (Hauréau) and the ‘Father of Speculative Philosophy’ (Huber).


I own up to being a huge if amateur fan, and will be looking at some of his ideas here.

And God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good.

So says Genesis (1:31). It's worth recalling that God worked for six days, creating things. Without doubt, man was the cherry on the cake, as it were, but one should not forget that God made everything else, too.

Which begs the question: Where is Christian cosmology, these days?

Our Greek and Russian Orthodox brothers and sisters would cast a sideways glance at this, I think. In their eyes, Christian cosmology is alive and well, whereas it would seem that 'the cosmic dimension' has been lost in the West. I must admit, I am inclined to agree, but then if the Orthodox trace their cosmology back to the Patristic Fathers, and they are our common heritage, then it would appear the fault does seem to lie with us Catholics for letting this light go out.

In my own small way, I hope to address that issue.

Cosmology will form a considerable component of this blog, and will shape many of the posts I make here. My primary reference will be St Maximus the Confessor, a bright star in the Patristic firmament, and to my mind a Doctor of the Tradition. He has bequeathed us a complete and luminous cosmological theology, and I will be referring to it often.

Watch this space.