Reclaiming the Vision of Eden

Toward a Sacramental Worldview

On the altar, between flickering candles, there is a chalice and there is a plate, there is bread and there is wine. When the priest says the words of Jesus, “take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you,” he lifts up the consecrated bread. A bell rings three times. Between each peal, there is a deep silence, a silence dense and rippling with meaning. It is a moment when time itself is pierced by eternity.

In Mass we are not looking back on an event that happened two thousand years ago, we are having it made present to us in sacramental form in the here and now. Every mass opens a window to the real event of the Crucifixion, the pivot point of all existence. Unlike other historical events, which are over and done with, this is an event that radiates forever. The Cross abides.¹

The Sacrifice of the Mass is the essence of what it is to worship. In it, the relationship between God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit is made visceral. In our limited human way we cannot fully intellectually comprehend the wondrous complexity of their inner dance, but during Mass we are able to intuit the fundamental truth of it: the cyclical exchange, the continual outpouring of love, the ceaseless flow of adoration, it has all been made ritually apparent. Leaving Mass we carry with us into the world the knowledge that material reality is intimately united with spiritual reality. This is a truth so difficult to comprehend yet so unmistakably true that mystics have spent lifetimes trying to capture its beauty.

Today, though, in the desert of our secular modernity, it is a notion more difficult to understand than ever. This is because, for most of us modern people, the material world has been torn asunder from the spiritual world. If we even admit there is a spiritual makeup to existence, most of us only feel comfortable admitting that it is somewhere else, distant and vague. In the here and now of the real world, it certainly does not intrude. There are a multitude of factors that created this modern way of perceiving the world. Mark Vernon discusses one of them in his book A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness.

Out of the Garden

In this book, Vernon writes that the Protestant Reformation had a revolutionary impact upon the interior life of individuals that changed how we experience the world, ourselves, and even our faith. Martin Luther, the pivotal figure of the Reformation, had a deep disdain for the inner lives of individuals. He saw people as wholly corrupted by sin and believed we should therefore be intensely suspicious of any presumed divine intimacy. As a result, Vernon writes that Luther sought a relationship to God that was not about a felt inner union, but about a dependency that could be secured externally.

Luther found this external security in the Bible, which was no longer to be read imaginatively but literally. This marked a change in the way people related to Scripture. Traditionally, the Bible had been understood in the way Christ and his followers would have understood Scripture, as both literal and symbolic at the same time, in a complex cascade of meanings and intentions. The Bible is a library of books, written across many centuries by many divinely inspired authors to tell one cohesive narrative. Some of its books are ancient creation myth, some are histories, some are poems and prayers, others prophecy, some are eyewitness accounts, while others are letters. In the traditional approach to the Bible there was not a stark division between the literal and symbolic, ancient people would struggle to even understand what we mean today by pitting the symbolic against the literal. There was, instead, a constant “intermingling of surface and depth. The Bible was as was everything else that God touched: exemplary and illustrative, inspired and basically trust-worthy.”²

In this way, a ‘literal’ reading of the Bible did not always mean to focus on the surface level of the narrative, but the deeper meanings the human author intended to convey. “By focusing on that, the receptive reader would find the full truth of the scripture disclosing itself to them, as it emerged in the space between their mind, the divine mind, and the text. The process might reveal something morally useful or practically instructive or new and revelatory. This was the sense in which the Bible was said to have authority. It was a window and a wellspring, as well as a map.”³

During Europe’s medieval era, which has been called “Christianity’s High Noon,” nature itself was seen in much the same way. The living world was a vast text through which God communicated to mankind, suffused with layers upon layers of meaning, from the most superficial to the most sublime. The study of the world allowed people to better perceive the workings of the divine mind, making science “a stepping stone to knowledge of God, and therefore to the best thing in us.”⁴ For many people of this era, daily life was experienced as an intricate, living web that connected the mundane to the divine, from harvest to childbirth, from feast days to penance, from the constellations in the night sky to the stories of the saints told around the fire on a cold, dark evening. Even time itself was rooted in the sublime as the Church’s liturgical seasons unspooled across the year.

But in the wake of the Reformation, Vernon argues this began to change. Increasingly, the Bible was engaged with in ways that were “analytical, rather than allegorical; and literal, rather than imaginative.”⁵ The surface level meaning of the text began to take on increasing importance and, eventually, for some people, sole importance. With the inward increasingly shorn from the outward, the understanding of what faith meant began to shift. It moved “from ‘felt trust’ to ‘cognitive belief.’ It ceased to be the starting point for a quest to understand and became a cerebral statement of what should be affirmed, ideally without question.”⁶

From there, the way people related to the complex web of the living world and the divine disclosure embedded within it began to come undone. There was no inherent spiritual meaning to a tree or a mountain or a stag, there was simply flora and fauna. There was no inner world, just crude matter to be dominated and used as humans saw fit. Science was no longer about growing closer to the mind of God, it was about proving what could be proved, and disproving what couldn’t. A way of thinking thus emerged in which all that was not factually provable began to no longer be seen as beyond the limited grasp of science, but as untrue or non-existent.

For 1500 years, mysticism - an intimate awareness of the presence of God - was a central feature of Christianity, but the thinking that emerged in the wake of the Reformation began to change that. “Introspection, arising from the quest for certainty about salvation, didn’t disappear. But the uneasiness about it meant that it was inclined to narrow obsessions over who was saved.”⁷ The individual was now tasked with navigating a terrible tension, between being the sole arbiter of divine interpretation while simultaneously being neurotically convinced that the self was too flawed to do so. From this, a fixation developed on a punitive, judicial understanding of salvation that altered traditional conceptions of soteriology.

This discussion is not intended to dismiss the positive outcomes of the Reformation (as I have written before, the gains - in knowledge, liberty, and social mobility - should not be taken for granted) or to suggest the pre-Reformation past was a utopia, but to convey the magnitude of change it brought about. It instigated a wholesale overturning of the social and religious order, massive land grabs, the forcible shutdown of thousands of religious centers and libraries, as well as the suppression of free speech, even in prayer. As Eamon Duffy argues, “The Reformation was a violent disruption, not the natural fulfillment, of most of what was vigorous in late medieval piety and religious practice.”⁸

Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 - 1580, is a useful book for unraveling many of the myths that have grown up around the Reformation. For one, it was not a time of ignorant laity who were passive, disconnected onlookers to the liturgy, but a time when there were an estimated 50,000 Books of Hours in circulation among the laity in England alone. “No other book commanded anything like such a readership.”⁹ Duffy contends that the advent of mass printing, then, did not pose a challenge to this trend, but rather endorsed a trajectory already underway. Medieval faith, Duffy argues, was not decadent, unpopular, or exhausted, but vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular.¹⁰

Given this, it would require a dramatic rupture to so thoroughly alter the status quo, which Vernon describes when chronicling the intensity of the Reformer’s efforts to upend the traditions of the faith: “The pressures led to violence expressed in the iconoclasm of the age. Reformers decapitated statues, nailed scriptures over holy pictures, and whitewashed the wall paintings that had spoken to the medieval pilgrim of their intimacy with the cosmos and God. Images came to be regarded with the same distrust as inner life. If they weren’t destroyed they were converted into moralizing signs.”¹¹

In this way, people were torn out of their ancient and elaborate ecosystem of faith, “one embedded in the divine flux of the lives of saints and angels, nature and celestial bodies,”¹² and into an increasingly disembodied experience of the divine as something sanitized, puritanical, and small enough to fit into the materialist perspective of reality.

Reaping the Fruits of a False Paradigm

The consequences of the Reformation as discussed by Vernon are intriguing, and in my mind they represent the full-flowering of a seed that exists within all of us, a seed planted much earlier, in the oldest story of them all. The Fall of Man explains the psychological underpinnings of human nature better than any other creation myth and in it we can see the root of our urge to separate the material from the spiritual.

In the Garden, when Adam and Eve live in obedience to the will of God, knowing that they are created beings and therefore not God - not all powerful, not in control of everything - they live in paradise. Their understanding of their relationship to the Creator allows them to enjoy the deepest expression of life; they are in intimate communion with the divine, enjoying a splendor and peace that is where we are all called to be.

But in eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve fall prey to a lie: that they can become as gods. In this, they believe they could stand alone, with no need to rely upon God. They would not need a spiritual reality anymore because they would look upon the superficial scrim of the world and trust in their own singular divinity, becoming the sole arbiters of what was permissible and not permissible, what was good and what was evil.

But after they have eaten from the Tree, Adam and Eve become aware of their nakedness and are stricken with fear. When they hear God approaching, they hide.

And the first thing God asks is: Where are you?

Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from the Tree because God wished to keep them close to him. To do this Adam and Eve needed to remain oriented to reality - which is to say oriented toward God - because this is for their truest good. It is only when oriented toward God and understanding who he is and who we are and the hierarchy therein, that humans can know true freedom. In eating from the Tree, Adam and Eve do not make themselves gods, what they do is separate themselves from God. Where are you? They were never meant to see the world in this way, or themselves as ruptured from within its sacred weave.

The seed planted in us with the Fall was nurtured throughout mankind’s history, and today it dominates our thinking. We recapitulate that moment in the Garden again and again whenever we see ourselves as atomized individuals living in a soulless world. Even many well-meaning Christians are trapped in this false paradigm. Accepting its faulty premise - that the material is separate from the spiritual - they try to work within this framework instead of rejecting it outright. This gives rise to things such as the quests to find the so-called “historical Jesus,” prove the earth is only six thousand years old, or notions that evolution can not be true because it contradicts Genesis, and so on. These endeavors are wholly submerged within the materialist framework and can inadvertently reify the notion that only what can be objectively proven can be meaningful. This is a mentality that also gives rise to the idea that the sacraments of the Church are merely symbolic, a notion that prevents us from partaking in a powerful glimpse of the vision of Eden.

Reclaiming the Vision of Eden

The modern worldview, in which we only believe in that which we can objectively see and prove, is a blinkered way of knowing. It cuts us off from deeper, stranger ways of encountering the truth. Through grace we can be guided on a different path, a path that teaches us an older, truer way of perceiving reality.

Humans are physical beings. We don’t just live in our bodies, we are our bodies. Our bodies are how we relate to the world. We know things because we can observe them with our senses - touch them, see them, smell them, hear them, taste them, and so on. Furthermore, God works through the physical world, which is, after all, his creation. Many instances in the Bible can be understood on one level as God teaching his people how to comprehend and relate to the symbolic reality radiating through the material world. Through men and women and a flood and a burning bush, and on mountain tops and beside rivers and beneath trees, the stories of the Bible emerge. Christ’s parables are laden with earthy, tactile imagery, as they tell of flocks of sheep, mustard seeds, lamp oil, and pearls. In this way, we can understand that divine meaning pours out through the material makeup of this world.

A brief look at the human experience throughout history “shows us that ritual is at the heart of how we act as human beings.”¹³ “We tend naturally to worshipful action because, in fact, we are created for worship, and ritual embraces our embodied, created nature to help direct our worship.”¹⁴ This is why our faith is rich with physical rituals, such as baptism and confirmation, marriage and communion, rituals that root our embodied human selves again and again in moments comprised of the simplest of things - water, oil, bread - in order to let us glimpse deeper spiritual realities. As sacraments they are visible signs “of the hidden reality of salvation.”¹⁵

During Mass, when God makes present Calvary, we are called to witness the salvation of the world. Christ, as the new Adam, restores what was lost in the Fall. It is not merely a symbol of something that happened long ago; “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” (Heb 13:8) so that “the past, present, and future are all one in Christ.”¹⁶ In this way, when we bring our embodied selves to Mass, we are participating in a ritual that makes clear to us the ways in which our timebound lives are suffused with God’s glorious eternity. Holy Communion, then, conveys one of the most transformative realities of all, one that can allow us to recapture the Edenic vision.

The Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, and it is a tonic to the modern mindset that tears asunder matter from spirit.

The Eucharist cleanses our perception so that we may learn to see the world as we were originally meant to see it, sacramentally, with matter and spirit united. Through the vision of Eden, meaning is once again made abundantly evident, in our world and in ourselves. We are given an expereince of the fullest expression of both our intellect and our intuition, which were never meant to be severed from one another but to work together in tandem.

“The sacramental worldview is a balm against the false ideologies that press upon us from all sides,”¹⁷ and when we practice seeing in this way we can be given a glimpse of the original consciousness intended for mankind. This is a way of being that is subsumbed in Christ and recognizes His glory radiating backward and forward through time. It gives us the grace and courage to see the whole of the world as a gift, as a Burning Bush, to know that “the sun rises and sets, the moon cycles through its phases, flowers spring up, blossom, and die, birds sing in the morning, and roost in the branches of trees at night, and we sing of all this to our Creator, coming alive together with all things.”¹⁸

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Painting is The Last Supper by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1085

2. A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness, Mark Vernon, page 145

3. Ibid, 147

4. Ibid, 142

5. Ibid, 158

6. Ibid, 156

7. Ibid, 155

8. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 - 1560, Eamon Duffy, page 4

9. Ibid, 8

10. Ibid, 5

11. Vernon, 155

12. Ibid, 151

13. Mysterion: The Revelatory Power of the Sacramental Worldview, Father Harrison Ayre, page 100

14. Ibid, 101

15. Catechism, 774

16. Ayre, 105

17. Ayre, 32

18. The Sunlillies: Eastern Orthodoxy as a Radical Counterculture, Graham Pardun, page 2