Mystery and Paradox
The Benefit of Not Knowing Latin
We don’t have to understand or know any Latin to benefit from its use. Actually, it may even beneficial if we don’t know any Latin. For most of Salvation History the worship of God was veiled and few if any people ever saw what was going on in the liturgy. This was the case in the Jewish […]
Mystery and Paradox
What defines this consensus, above all—what distiguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta—is a commitment to mystery and paradox. + Thus orthodox Christians insist that Jesus Christ was divine and human all at once, that the Absolute is somehow Three as well as One, that God is omnipotent and omniscient and yet […]
Orthodoxy Week #5: Keeping Furious Opposites
The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the […]
Orthodoxy Week #4: Perhaps It is Christianity That is Sane
This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not […]
Orthodoxy Week #1: A Collision
As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for […]
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