Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

This Guy Reminds Me Why I'm Christian

Here's a nifty little quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemman's "For the Life of the World":

The "original sin" of post-patristic theology consists therefore in the reduction of the concept of knowledge to rational or discursive knowledge or, in other terms, in the separation of knowledge from "mysterion". This theology does not reject the "symbolical world view" of the earlier tradition: the sentence quoted above--"omnes...sensibiles creaturae sunt signa rerum sacrum"--is from St. Thomas. But it radically changes the understanding of that "signum." In the early tradition, and this if of paramount importance, the relationship between the sign in the symbol (A) and that which it "signifies" (B) is neither a merely sematnic one (A means B), nor causal (A is the cause of B), nor representative (A represents B). We called this relationship an epiphany. "A is B" means that the whole of A expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests the "reality" of B (although not necessarily the whole of it) without, however, losing its own ontological reality, without being dissolved in another "res."
But it was precisely this relationship between the A and the B, between the sign and the signified, that was changed. Because of the reduction of knowledge to rational or discursive knowledge there appears between A and B a hiatus. The symbol may stll be means of knowledge but, as all knowledge, it is knowledge about and not knowledge of. It can be a revelation about the "res," but not the epiphany of the "res" itself. A can mean B, or represent it, or even, in certain instances, be the "cause" of its presence; but A is no longer viewed as the very means of participation in B. Knowledge and participation are now two different realities, two different orders.

It's all in Plotinus, bless me. What do they teach them at these schools?