If you have not done so already, I recommend reading the previous two posts. Here and here.
Levels of Being
Reality is structured as multiple levels of being, or one can say, the cosmos is structured as multiple levels or reality. Each level can be seen as a reflection of the others. The lower levels are a microcosm of the higher levels. An example was provided in the previous post, as depicted rather crudely:
In the “proposed model” of the previous post, the person stood at center–with the Eucharist truly central to the entire schema. The human person is a microcosm of the cosmos, while he or she is part of the Church, which itself is a microcosm of creation–or cosmos, or the renewed creation. In the above model the person is decentralized to show that each person participates in the life of the Church, in that regard, they are not central.
However, each person is anointed to act as priest within the cosmic order. Each is part of the royal priesthood. He or she is a microcosm: comprised of both the material and immaterial, spiritual and physical aspects of reality. The Holy Trinity breathed the breathe of life into the dust of the earth in order to give meaning to His creation. Man (Adam) was created with the capacity for reciprocity. He was to take the gifts of God and bless and give them back to the Creator. This eucharistic act is central to each person. As each person stands atop the mountain of Paradise eucharistically worshiping the Creator, he stands as mediator between heaven and earth. This is the anthropological maximalism that has always been taught by the Church. And this is what has been fulfilled in the theandric mystery of Christ. Each person participates in Christ’s priesthood.
At the different levels of reality (or being) this same structure is evident. As the person is a microcosm within the Church, the Church is also a microcosm. Before continuing this line of thought, I want to clear away any misconceptions. When I speak about the different levels of reality, this does not mean that I am affirming deism. I am not claiming that reality is split, or that God exists up there…and we are down here. We don’t dwell in a two-story universe, to borrow a concept from Fr. Stephen Freeman. What Fr. Stephen speaks against is the idea of a naturalistic, mechanistic world, which is immanent, below a transcendent world, with the latter having little to do with the former. Wholeheartedly I agree with Fr. Stephen. When I speak about the different levels of reality, I’m mainly describing a hierarchy of being. Some things are more immanent to us, say the computer or tablet you’re looking at while reading this. Some things are more transcendent, the obvious is the Divine Essence. It will behoove us not to demarcate things too assuredly by placing them within these different categories because we often find the transcendent piercing through the veil of immanence. If you’re married (or have been), your spouse is obviously immanent to you, there is a selfsameness; moreover, there is a clear reciprocity at your level of being (or reality). Yet for all of their immediacy, there is an ineffable part of your spouse, something transcendent, something other. These levels can interpenetrate one another. So we must be careful not to assume a literal hierarchy to such a degree that we falsely assume that God presides in outer space having no contact below.
This was, in part, inspired by St. Maximus’ comparisons between the Church and creation, the human person and the temple layout, the church building and the people of God, etc. These images always pointed to something else, they were iconic. He was quite prolific with expounding on the many analogous connections between the seemingly disparate aspects of Christianity. The Church being an image of creation, and the idea of movement is influential on the ideas laid out here.
The Movement of Mission
The most basic application of the concentric circles model is the person within a community, the community within the world.
Person–>Community–>World
The person goes out from their local church into the community to bring those back into the local church. At the next level of reality, the Church as community goes into the world to draw those back into the Church. This is an act that simultaneously engages and transforms the world.
Introducing the concept of microcosm into the schema, changes it to:
Man–>Church–>Cosmos
The concentric circles model depicts these microcosms at different levels. We can easily add more levels to this model but for our purposes this will suffice.
What this means for the missional action of the Church is that the symbolic nature of mission itself is expressed on each level of reality: the personal (man), communal (Church), and world (cosmic). It will be apparent the different levels interpenetrate each other, there will be a raising up or a bringing down within each level. I will briefly describe what this looks like at each level. I do apologize that at times I will use the word “man” to denote the human person, but please keep in mind that it is to be understood in the ancient sense of adam meaning universal humanity.
First, at the level of person it is seemingly obvious that the missional mandate is acted interpersonally. At all these levels there is movement out and then a return. Man goes out from the local church into the chaos of the community (localized world) to share the gospel. He indwells the narrative and attends to his world through it, much like how a surgeon uses a scalpel–the instrument becomes an extension of themselves (for more on this check out Michael Polanyi). The single Christian attends to the world through the narrative, this attending is how a person perceives the world and engages with it. The telos of this going-out is to bring those outside (the community outside the local church, the localized world) into the fold of the Church made manifest by the local church. Since the human person is a microcosm, this individual action ripples outward and upward through the other circles–or realities, levels of being. Their individual missional act is a fulfillment of the Great Commission conferred on the whole Church
Shifting to the Church, we see the missional act at work at the communal level, at the same time their is a going-out and attending-to the world–world at this level needs to be understood universally, cosmically, larger than just the local community. The Church is in the world but not of it. There is a physical presence of the Church, namely buildings, but I want to consider the Church qua Body of Christ on earth: the historical, temporal Church, the physical presence of the Mystical Body in the here and now. The Church Militant is often used to describe this aspect of the Church. I like this description for the simple fact that it reminds us that we are at war. The same going-out happens at this level, but the return should be understood as a return to the universal Church. Moreover it can also be understood as expanding territory. As the Church goes out into the world–to the four corners of the earth–to attend to the world, the same way that is done at the personal level, the Church is symbolically claiming more souls. This can take the form of physical territory as well, this is seen with national churches, which I plan to stay clear of in this post. And the returning is not just understood as the Church returning back to herself, but it is understood as those who have been born into exile are returning to the people of God. At the communal level the Church is working to heal the brokenness of the world. Or said another way, the telos at this level is salvation or recreation. The Church is a microcosm of creation, or renewed creation, so bearing witness to God’s salvific act in the world becomes the Church’s focus at this level, and because of this the Church truly fulfills the Great Commission in her time and place. This is a lowering or bringing down of the cosmic.
Which leads us to the cosmic level of reality. This is where things can get a little more nebulous (was that a bad pun?). At this level we’ve shifted to the macrocosmic. Still one can speak of the cosmic as microcosm of an even higher level, i.e. the Divine. Here mission takes its most grand form, the missional act includes both the Church militant and triumphant. The Eschaton has come. The End is the telos (which sounds tautological). The fullness of the Kingdom is here. The entire cosmos has been recreated and healed. Since the cosmos is an all-encompassing term, there will be no going-out and returning-to in the same sense as at the other levels of reality. This may be best understood as the eternal movement that St. Gregory of Nyssa writes about–however, I may be stretching this too far. St. Maximus offers us the ontological structure of origin, movement, and goal (return). God is the start and end points for all being. All created beings are on a trajectory to return to Him. For our purposes now, there is a movement but it is inward and downward, instead of outward and upward. This movement is evinced when the Kingdom is made manifest within the lower levels. The blessing of the waters at Theophany, baptism, and the Eucharist are in-breaking of the cosmic, the Kingdom. Circling back to movement, through the act of the Church God brings about the return of creation, the end is made manifest in temporal space, this is the return to the prelapsarian condition of creation.
Conclusion: Arriving at the Mountain
So we come now to the Altar. The Eucharist is the central act of the Church, it happens within the local church, comprised of persons. It is an action of the entire Church. And it is the overlapping of eschatology and ecclesiology, it is cosmic act, the raising up of earth and the lowering of heaven. Paradise we have entered. The concentric circles model is the same structure as the mountain. What is central is also the highest.
This
becomes this
We’ve now returned to the structure of the mountain. Paradise is the colliding of heaven and earth. The Church is the city atop the hill, a light to the world. It is her mission to move out and draw those back. This rhythm is the same pattern as breathing. Exhalation, inhalation. In and out. The Church is the lungs of the world.
