Liturgy As Revelatory Communication

A Theme in Jean Corbon's "The Wellspring of Worship"

“Only by the economy do we enter the theology,” so stipulates the theologian Jean Corbon in his classic work The Wellspring of Worship; for, “the Blessed Trinity reveals itself to us only in its love-inspired plan that is carried out for the sake of human beings and in conjunction with them” (The Wellspring of Worship, 30). All ‘knowing’ of God is predicated upon voluntary divine disclosure and human receptivity and cooperation. We know about the Creator via the things he has created (cf. Rom. 1:20) precisely because creation itself is ‘grace’, God’s first and principal “kenosis” (< Gre. κένωσις—kenosis, meaning ‘self-emptying’) or ‘self-gift’ in which he is disclosed and wherein he awaits a response of acceptance (cf. Corbon 32). “The more our God gives himself, the more he reveals himself” (ibid. 39).

The ultimate revelation is the Christ Event wherein God the Word takes up the totality of human nature as the medium of his own disclosure and “revelatory principle [τῆς οἰκείας ἐκφαντικὸς—tes oikeias ekphantikos] of His own Divinity” (Maximus. Ambig. Thom. 5.18). In Christ, God and man act in the unity of a single person—theandric action (< Gre. θεανδρικὴν ἐνέργειαν—theandriken energeian). Understood in an orthodox manner, this does not mean a single operation; but rather, two energies/activities “divine and human coincide[ing] in a single identity” (Ambig. Thom. 5. 19)—in the single person or hypostasis (ὑπόστασις) of Christ—operating in perfect co-operation. As Corbon summarizes, in Jesus we see “the supreme embodiment of…synergy [< Gre. συνεργία—synergia]” (Corbon 40). Thus, in the kenosis of the Word of God “our entire authentic human condition, manifests the Holy One of God, who has immersed himself in it. Through the baptism of the Son into our humanity all flesh—every person and community, all of time and the world, all suffering and joy, all death and life—is permeated with the presence of the Wholly Other” (ibid. 41). In Christ, anything authentically human can become ‘revelatory communication’ as “mystery becomes event” (43).

God in his earthly sojourn fills the human condition with himself, in toto…even unto death (cf. Phil 2:8) the universal experience of all men. In full-filling human nature with his own divinity, he not only overcomes it but opens it up to be filled with divine life (cf. Corbon 46). Thus, the humanity of Christ is the sacrament of God, the conduit of divine-human intercourse; for, “nothing can pass from God to man or from man to God except through his body” (ibid. 95). When the kenosis of God becomes, at the moment of the Resurrection, the return of Adam to the Father, “economy turns to liturgy” (119) and the communion of God with Man finally begins (cf. 65). In the Ascension that risen and deified humanity enters into the eternal liturgy before the throne of God (cf. 58-67) allowing for all humanity to participate in it, thus becoming the very wellspring of life (cf. 55, also John 5:20-21, 26-27). And finally, in Pentecost, God the Holy Spirit reveals to the Church to be what it is, the body of Christ (cf. 74) wherein all human beings and all things human are “recapitulated [<Gre. ἀνακεφαλαίωσις—anakephalaiosis, cf. Eph. 1:10]” (75, also 109). By the power of the Spirit “the Church in turn becomes the visible, present, accessible fountainhead that is given to human beings in order that they may be able to see, hear, and touch the Word of Life. It is always in his body that the Word comes to save human beings” (75). Salvation consists in being within Christ’s victorious humanity—the Church (120-21, cf. Heb. 10:25).

Likewise, at Pentecost “a dwelling which is no other than Christ—becomes the Church” (76); for, “through the Holy Spirit the liturgy” the communion made possible in the God-Man, “finds ‘embodiment’ in the Church” (75). That same revelatory dynamism of Christ’s humanity pervades her existence as “the human face of the heavenly liturgy” (77). That same soteriological power subsists in her activity; for, “the Christ event becomes the event of his Church only if it is acted out and not simply thought or felt” (125) and the once-and-for-all (cf. Heb. 10:10) can transform from “an edifying memory” (120) to a perpetual reality. This, ‘enactment’ must involve not just mind or spirit, but the whole person (cf. 125). Not that is crucified again, but because we temporal and spatial creatures must ceaselessly enter anew that eternal offering (cf. 120). Indeed the very contours of divine kenosis shape the liturgy and as a condescension to and assimilation of what is human to what is divine. This can be seen even in the multiplicity of the sacraments wherein God “meet[s] the different needs of the human being who is to be divinized” (128). Thus, that same synergia of divine and human operation fundamentally marks the nature of her liturgy (cf. Ibid. 76-77, 98, and 113). Liturgy is the co-operation of the Spirit and the Bride (cf. Rev. 22:17), wherein nothing authentically human is alien (cf. Corbon 107).

Corbon identifies five “structural constraints” (126), rooted in authentic human nature, that inform the liturgical life of the Church: group, word, gesture, space, and time (cf. 127). These elements give rise to the diversity of liturgical expression in the Church. For the Church is ‘one,’ for it participates in the one eternal liturgy (cf. 128, 122); but, it is also ‘catholic’ (< Gre. καθολικός—katholikos, from κατά—kata ‘of the,’ and ὅλος—olos ‘whole’) which presupposes a plurality of communities—the two terms are simply synonymous but represent two poles of the Church’s existence held in dynamic tension. Moments in which the Church participates in the eternal liturgy are by definition moments in which a particular Church participates in the eternal liturgy (cf. 121). The Church is no abstraction, thus “the Church is thus local or she is not at all” (ibid.). Thus, “the incarnate condition of each church” (123), the particularity of the baptized Christian who celebrates the liturgy, “their language and culture; their living tradition; in short, everything that goes to make a Church” (122) is indispensable to the nature of the Church as an incarnate reality. The celebration of the one liturgy by the one Church in the multiplicity of her local communities and celebrations “manifest[s], concretize[s], and communicate[s] their unity in catholicity” (122). The Church as the perpetuation of Christ’s saving Body, is universally humanized (ἐνανθρωπήσαντα—enanthropisanta, Symb. Nicæ.) precisely in being embodied within human particularity. Liturgy is a revelatory and saving recapitulation in Christ.

Works Cited

Corbon, Jean. The Wellspring of Worship. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005.

Maximos the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Vol. I. Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.