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The Liturgy Lived: The Divinization of Man | Jean Corbon, O.P.
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This article is an excerpt from The
Wellspring of Worship (Ignatius Press, 2005).
If we consent in prayer to be flooded by the river
of life, our entire being will be transformed; we will become trees of
life and be increasingly able to produce the fruit of the Spirit: we will
love with the very Love that is our God. It is necessary at every moment
to insist on this radical consent, this decision of the heart by which
our will submits unconditionally to the energy of the Holy Spirit;
otherwise we shall remain subject to the illusion created by mere knowledge
of God and talk about him and shall in fact remain apart from him in brokenness
and death. On the other hand, if we do constantly renew this offering
of our sinful hearts, let us not imagine that our New Covenant with Jesus
will be a personal encounter pure and simple. The communion into which
the Spirit leads us is not limited to a face-to-face encounter between
the person of Christ and our own person or to an external conformity of
our wills with his. The lived liturgy does indeed begin with this "moral"
union, but it goes much further. The Holy Spirit is an anointing, and
he seeks to transform all that we are into Christ: body, soul, spirit,
heart, flesh, relations with others and the world. If love is to become
our life, it is not enough for it to touch the core of our person; it
must also impregnate our entire nature.
To this transformative power of the river of life that permeates the entire
being (person and nature), the undivided tradition of the Churches gives
an astonishing name that sums up the mystery of the lived liturgy: theosis
or divinization. Through baptism and the seal of the gift of the Holy
Spirit we have become "sharers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the
liturgy of the heart, the wellspring of this divinization streams out
as the Holy Spirit, and our individual persons converge in a single origin.
But how is this mysterious synergy to infuse our entire nature from its
smallest recesses to its most obvious behaviors? This process is the drama
of divinization in which the mystery of the lived liturgy is brought to
completion in each Christian.
The Mystery of Jesus
To enter into the name of the holy Lord Jesus does not mean simply contemplating
it from time to time or occasionally identifying with his passionate love
for the Father and his compassion for men. It also means sharing faithfully
and increasingly in his humanity, in assuming which he assumed ours as
well. In our baptism we "put on Christ" in order that this putting on
might become the very substance of our life. The beloved Son has united
us to himself in his body, and the more he makes our humanity like his
own, the more he causes us to share in his divinity. The humanity of Jesus
is new because it is holy. Even in its mortal state it shared in the divine
energies of the Word, without confusion and in an unfathomable synergy
in which his will and human behavior played their part. Jesus is not a
divinized man; he is the truly incarnated Word of God.
This last statement means that we need not imitate, from afar and in an
external way, the behavior of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel, in order
thereby to effect our own divinization and become "like God"; self-divinization
is the primal temptation ever lurking in wait. On the contrary, it is
the Word who divinizes this human nature, which he has united to himself
once and for all. Since his Resurrection his divinehuman energies are
those of his Holy Spirit, who elicits and calls for our response; in the
measure of this synergy of the Spirit and our heart our humanity shares
in the life of the holy humanity of Christ. To enter into the name of
Jesus, Son of God and Lord, means therefore to be drawn into him in the
very depths of our being, by the same drawing movement in which he assumed
our humanity by taking flesh and living out our human condition even to
the point of dying. There is no "panchristic" pseudo-mysticism here, because
the human person remains itself, a creature who is free over against its
Lord and God. Neither, however, is there any moralism (a further error
that waits to ensnare us), because our human nature really shares in the
divinity of its Savior.
"Man becomes God as much as God becomes a man", says Saint Maximus the
Confessor. [1] Christian holiness is divinization because in our concrete
humanity we share in the divinity of the Word who married our flesh. The
"divine nature" of which Saint Peter speaks (2 Pet 1:4) is not an, abstraction
or a model, but the very life of the Father, which he eternally communicates
to his Son and his Holy Spirit. The Father is its source, and the Son
extends it to us by becoming a man. We become God by being more and more
united to the humanity of Jesus. The only question left, then since this
humanity is the way by which our humanity will put on his divinityis
this: How did the Son of God live as a man in our mortal condition? The
Gospel has been written precisely in order to show us "the mind of Christ
Jesus" (Phil 2:5); [2] it is this mind with which the Holy Spirit seeks
to fill our hearts.
According to the spirituality of the Church and according to the gifts
of the Spirit given to every one, each of the baptized lives out more
intensely one or other aspect of the mind of Christ; at the same time,
however, the mystery of divinization is fundamentally the same in all
Christians. Their humanity no longer belongs to them, in the possessive
and deadly sense of "belong", but to him who died and rose for them. In
an utterly true sense, all that makes up my natureits powers of
life and death, its gifts and experiences, its limits and sinsis
no longer "mine" but belongs to "him who loved me and gave himself up
for me". This transfer of ownership is not idealistic or moral but realistic
and mystical. As we shall see, the identification of Jesus with the humanity
of every human person plays a very large part in the new relationship
that persons establish with other men; but when the identification is
willingly accepted and when our rebellious wills submit to his Spirit,
divinization is at work. I was wounded by sin and radically incapable
of loving; now Love has become part of my nature again: "I am alive; yet
it is no longer 1, but Christ living in me" (Gal 2:20).
The Realism of the Liturgy of the Heart
The mystical realism of our divinization is the fruit of the sacramental
realism of the liturgy. Conversely, evangelical moralism, with which we
so often confuse life according to the Spirit, is the inevitable result
of a deterioration of the liturgy into sacred routines. But when the fontal
liturgy, which is the realism of the mystery of Christ, gives life to
our sacramental celebrations, in the same measure the Spirit transfigures
us in Christ.
The Fathers of the early centuries tell us that "the Son of God became
a man, in order that men might become sons of God". The stages by which
the beloved Son came among us and united himself to us to the point of
dying our death are the same stages by which he unites us to him and leads
us to the Father, to the point of making us live his life. These stages
of the one Way that is Christ are shown to us in figures in the Old Testament;
Jesus fulfilled the prefigurations. The stages are creation and promise,
Passover and exodus, Covenant and kingdom, exile and return, restoration
and expectation of the consummation. The two Testaments inscribed this
great Passover of the divinizing Incarnation in the book of history. But
in the last times the Bible becomes life; it exists in a liturgical condition,
and the action of God is inscribed in our hearts. Knowledge of the mystery
is no longer a mental process but an event that the Holy Spirit accomplishes
in the celebrated liturgy and then brings to fulfillment by divinizing
us.

   
But it is not enough simply to understand the ways
in which Christ divinizes us; the primary thing is to be able to live
them. At certain "moments" the celebrated liturgy gives us an intense
experience of the economy of salvation, which is divinization, in order
that we may live it at all "times", these new times into which it has
brought us. According to the Fathers of the desert, either we pray always
or we never pray. But in order to pray always we must pray often and sometimes
at length. In like manner (for we are dealing with the same mystery),
in order to divinize us the Spirit must divinize us often and sometimes
very intensely. The economy of salvation that emerges from the Father
through his Christ in the Holy Spirit expands to become the divinized
life that Christians live in the Holy Spirit, through the name of Jesus,
the Christ and Lord, in movement toward the Father. But the celebration
of the liturgy is the place and moment in which the river of life, hidden
in the economy, penetrates the life of the baptized in order to divinize
it. It is there that everything that the Word experiences for the sake
of man becomes Spirit and life.
The Holy Spirit, Iconographer of Divinization
In the economy of salvation everything reaches completion in Jesus through
the outpouring of the Holy Spirit; in the liturgy as celebrated and as
lived everything begins through the Holy Spirit. That is why at the existential
origin of our divinization is the liturgy of the heart, the synergy in
which the Holy Spirit unites himself to our spirit (Rom 8:16) in order
to make us be, and show that we are, sons of God. The same Spirit who
"anointed" the Word with our humanity and imprinted our nature upon him
is written in our hearts as the living seal of the promise, in order that
he may "anoint" us with the divine nature: he makes us christs in Christ.
Our divinization is not passively imposed on us, but is our own vital
activity, proceeding inseparably from him and from ourselves.
When the Spirit begins his work in us and with us, he is not faced with
the raw, passive earth out of that he fashioned the first Adam or, much
less, the virginal earth, permeated by faith, that he used in effecting
the conception of the second Adam. What the Spirit finds is a remnant
of glory, an icon of the Son: ceaselessly loved, but broken and disfigured.
Each of us can whisper to him what the funeral liturgy cries out in the
name of the dead person: I remain the image of your inexpressible glory,
even though I am wounded by sin!" [3] This trust that cannot be confounded
and this Covenant that cannot be broken form the space wherein the patient
mystery of our divinization is worked out.
The sciences provide grills for interpreting the human riddle, but when
these have been applied three great questions still remain in all that
we seek and in all that we do: the search for our origin, the quest for
dialogue, the aspiration for communion. On the one hand, why is it that
I am what I am, in obedience to a law that is stronger than I am (see
Rom 7)? On the other, in the smallest of my actions I await a word, a
counterpart who will dialogue with me. Finally, it is clear that our mysterious
selves cannot achieve fulfillment on any level, from the most organic
to the most aesthetic, except in communion. These three pathways in my
being are, as it were, the primary imprints in me of the image of glory,
of the call of my very being to the divine likeness in which my divinization
will be completed. The Holy Spirit uses arrows of fire in restoring our
disfigured image. The fire of love consumes its opposite (sin) and transforms
us into itself, which is Light.
We wander astray like orphans as long as we have not accepted him, the
Spirit of sonship, as our virginal source. All burdens are laid upon us,
and we are slaves as long as we are not surrendered to him who is freedom
and grace. And because he is the Breath of Life, it is he who will teach
us to listen (we are dumb only because we are deaf); then, the more we
learn to hear the Word, the better we shall be able to speak. Our consciences
will no longer be closed or asleep, but will be transformed into creative
silence. Finally, Utopian love and the communion that cannot be found
because it is "not of this world" are present in him, the "treasure of
every blessing", not as acquired and possessed but as pure gift; our relationship
with others becomes transparent once again. This communion of the Holy
Spirit is the master stroke in the work of divinization, because in this
communion we are in communion also with the Father and his Son, Jesus
(2 Cor 13:13; Jn 1:3), and with all our brothers.
Following these three pathways of the transfigured icon, we are divinized
to the extent that the least impulses of our nature find fulfillment in
the communion of the Blessed Trinity We then "live" by the Spirit, in
oneness with Christ, for the Father. The only obstacle is possessiveness,
the focusing of our persons on the demands of our nature, and this is
sin for the quest of self breaks the relation with God. The asceticism
that is essential to our divinization and that represents once again a
synergy of grace consists in simply but resolutely turning every movement
toward possessiveness into an offering. The epiclesis on the altar of
the heart must be intense at these moments, so that the Holy Spirit may
touch and consume our death and the sin that is death's sting. Entering
into the name of Jesus, the Son of God and the Lord who shows mercy to
us sinners, means handing over to him our wounded nature, which he does
not change by assuming but which he divinizes by putting on. From offertory
to epiclesis and from epiclesis to communion the Spirit can then ceaselessly
divinize us; our life becomes a eucharist until the icon is completely
transformed into him who is the splendor of the Father.
ENDNOTES:
[1] PG 91:101C.
[2] 'Sometimes translated as "the sentiments of Christ Jesus" . The meaning,
however, is not "sentiments" in an emotional sense, but rather attitudes
of the heart that lead to certain forms of behavior, that is, the "ways
of God" lived at the human level.
[3] Byzantine funeral liturgy.
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Jean Corbon,O.P.,1924-2001, born in Paris, was a priest of the GreekCatholic
eparchy of Beirut. He was a professor of Liturgy and Ecumenism at the University
of the Holy Spirit in Kalik, and the University of St. Joseph in Beirut.
Fr. Corbon was also a
contributor to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, helping
to compose the fourth section on prayer.
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