One Week of Class Later...

I have now been through one full week of class, meaning I've had all of my classes once, and while I am excited about all of them to one extent or another, I think the two I am looking forward to the most at the moment are Introduction to Liturgy and Sources from Antiquity.

Sources from Antiquity is going to focus on Aristotle and Plato, and while I read both of them as an undergraduate,  I am excited to be reading and discussing them in an explicitly Catholic environment.  While it was clear even when I read them in a secular environment that the two of them formed much of the basis for a great deal of Catholic theology, I'm excited by the prospect of reading them while explicitly looking for how that basis is formed.  The first semester of this course is to focus on the soul - what Plato and Aristotle had to say about the nature of the soul and then how the Church Fathers established the Christian teaching on the soul in their theologies.  As I mentioned earlier, I have certainly seen the influence of Plato and Aristotle on St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas before, but I'm excited to examine these philosopher's influence on Christian theology more closely.

Another thing I'm enjoying about the Sources class is that for our first week's reading, a large portion of the reading is Greek mythology, the reasoning being that in order to truly appreciate and understand what was said by the early philosophers, one must first understand at least a little about the world in which they lived, and the beliefs held by those around them.  Not only do I agree with such an assessment, but I'm also enjoying the refresher course on the myths.

While I was excited about taking Sources from antiquity from the moment I saw the class name, Introduction to Liturgy did not grab my interest from the title alone, but it was pretty close.  After going through the usual things like the syllabus, we started in on the coursework and started with a careful definition of liturgy; that is what separates it from other types of worship.  Ultimately we decided on a definition of liturgy as a form of visible worship that extends or prolongs the high priesthood of Jesus Christ.  Additionally our Liturgy looks in two directions; it participates both in the Divine Liturgy at the end of time, where the angles and all the faithful participate in glorifying God, and at the same time it looks back at the historical life of Christ, who lived, died, and rose from the dead, and who is truly present in the Eucharist.

For Introduction to Liturgy, we have read excerpts from Maximos the Confessor, in particular when he talks about Christ as He unites creation in Himself, healing the divisions that were created in the fall.  In Christ the inhabited world is united with paradise; we see this in Christ's words to the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise."  After His resurrection, Christ unites the inhabited world with Heaven through His ascension, entering Heaven with his earthly body; this unification demonstrates that all sensible nature is one.  Maximos then goes on to say: "Then, in addition to his, having passed with His soul and body, that is, with the whole of our nature, through all the divine and intelligible orders of heaven, He united sensible things with intelligible things, displaying in Himself the fact that the convergence of the entire creation toward unity was absolutely indivisible and beyond all fracture."  Admittedly I haven't fully wrapped my head around this part yet, but I intend to bring it up at class and see if I can't get it clearer in my head.  Finally, Maximos says, "He comes to God Himself ... He who as Word can never in any way be separated from the Father - fulfilling as man, in deed and truth, and with perfect obedience, all that He Himself as God had preordained should take place, having completed the whole plan of God the Father for us."  In other words, finally unifying all that was created with that which was not created, that is, with God.

Well this post ended up being a good deal denser than I meant it to be, but I hope you enjoyed it at least half as much as enjoyed reading Maximos.  In any event, I have a fair amount of reading still to do before I can call it a night, but I'll try to post again soon with more about what I'm doing and studying.