In the realm of worship, then, the crucial problem of
modem life is summed up. How can life operate once again in the dynamic
dimension of a communal use of the world? How can technology rediscover
the ethos of art and serve the authenticity of life, the communal realization
of man's personal distinctiveness and freedom through his use of the world?
How can the eucharistic mode of existence even today reconcile the rationalism
of technology with a reverence for the inner principle or reason in created
things, and do away with the pollution and rape of nature, the debauchery
of industry over the living body of the world?
There are certainly no answers to these questions which
could serve as objective rules or formulae laying down how life should
be organized. If there are answers, they will emerge organically once
our life is worked out in the right way, and to this end eucharistic liturgy
and art can guide us in a dynamic fashion. What must be made clear first
and foremost is that the eucharist of the Church loses any ontological
content and turns into a conventional outlet for religious feelings once
the bread and wine of the mystery are turned into abstract symbols, and
cease to sum up the cosmic dimensions of life as a communal event.
If we accept that man's relationship with God is not
simply intellectual, nor in a legalistic sense "moral," but necessarily
involves his use of the world, then the Gospel truth of salvation is being
undermined by the way modern man is cut off from ascesis, from
the practical study of natural reality and respect for it, and is isolated
in the autonomous self-sufficiency of technology. Even from the earliest
years, the Church has used every means to defend her truth against the
danger of being turned into an abstract, intellectual system of metaphysics
or a legal code of utilitarian deontology. In every heresy, she has perceived
above all the primacy of an individual, intellectual understanding of
her truth, and ignorance or neglect of the experiential immediacy with
which the Church lives the event of salvation. The Christ of the heresies
is a moral paradigm of the perfect man, or else an abstract idea of a
disincarnate God. In both cases, man's life is not substantially changed
in any way: his existence is condemned either to annihilation along with
his body in the earth, or else to an immortality necessary by nature,
while individual or collective "improvements" in human life turn out to
be fraudulent and senseless, or else a naked deception.
In the period of the ecumenical councils, the Church
stood out against the intellectual forms of the heresies in order to preserve
the cosmic universality of her eucharistic hypostasis, the salvation embodied
in the bread and wine of the eucharist. She stood for the salvation of
man's body, not merely his "spirit," from the absurdity of death; she
stood for the belief that it is possible for the humble material of the
world– the flesh of the earth and of man– to be united with
the divine life, and, corruptible though it is, to put on incorruption.
It took centuries of striving before language was able to subdue the arbitrariness
of individual logic and to express the dynamics of life as revealed by
the incarnation of the Word. And, side by side with the language, there
was the artist's struggle to speak the same truth with his brush, not
schematically or allegorically, but imprinting in design and color the
glory of man's flesh and the flesh of the world made incorruptible. Then
there was also the formative song of the architect who makes stone and
clay into "word," giving them reason and meaning; and in his building
the One who is uncontainable is contained, He who is without flesh is
made flesh, and the entire creation and the beauty of creation are justified.
And, besides these, there was the hymn of the poet and the melody of the
musician, an art which subjugates the senses instead of being subjugated
by them, revealing in this subjection the secret of life which conquers
death.
Thus man's separation from the asceticism of art and
the art of ascesis– the practical encounter with the potentialities
for salvation in the flesh of man and of the world– and his isolation
in the individualistic self-sufficiency provided by technology leads to
a "religious" alienation of the Church's truth, to the Christ of the heresies–
a moral paradigm of perfect man, or an abstract idea of disincarnate God.
A eucharistic use of the world certainly does not preclude
technology, the use of technical means; on the contrary, any form of ascetic
art always requires highly developed technical skill. However much technology
develops it does not altogether cease to be a "rational" use of the world,
a use with reason and meaning. But the problem begins as soon as this
"rationality" is restricted to man's individual intellectual capacity
and ignores or violates the principle of the intrinsic beauty of the natural
material; as soon as man's use of the world serves exclusively to make
him existentially autonomous, and proudly to cut him off from the rhythm
of the life of the world. What we now call technocracy is technology made
absolute, or, better, the ethos which accompanies a certain technological
use of the world. It does not aim to serve life as communion and personal
relationship, and therefore ignores also the personal dimension
of the world, the manifestation of God's personal energy in the world.
It is geared towards man's greed as a consumer, his instinctive need to
acquire possessions and to enjoy himself.2
If the autonomous operation of capital– of absolute
individual or corporate interests– did not make human beings subject
to the mechanized necessity for production, and if machines served the
communal reality of life, the personal, responsible and creative participation
of every worker in production, then their use could perhaps be as much
a liturgical and eucharistic act as sowing, harvesting or gathering grapes.
But anything of that kind requires a particular ethos in man, a definite
attitude on man's part towards the material world and its use.
The eucharistic use of the world and its relationship
with man's technical accomplishments find a complete communal model
in the case of ecclesial or liturgical art. So perhaps the most substantial
contribution that theological ethics can make to solving the problems
created by modern technocracy should be to study the ethos of church art–
or, more precisely, to study how the problem of technology is posed, and
what ethos is expressed by the technology, the technique of liturgical
art.
2 The ethos expressed
by modern technocracy does not cease to be a derivative of human nature,
of the existential adventure of man's freedom. So the ascetic knowledge
of man, the empirical exploration of the mysterious depths of man's rebellion
by the saints and wise men of the desert, has also described the ethos
of technocracy with astounding clarity, at a time when the problem of
that ethos could be posed only on a very small scale. St Isaac the Syrian
writes, characteristically: "When knowledge follows the desire of the
flesh, it brings with it these tendencies: wealth, vanity, adornment,
rest for the body, and eagerness for the wisdom of that logic which is
suitable for the administration of this world; it is constantly making
new discoveries both in skills and in knowledge, and abounds also in everything
else that is the crown of the body in this visible world. As a result
of this, it comes to oppose faith... for it is stripped of any concern
for God, and makes the mind irrational and powerless, because it is dominated
by the body. Its concern is wholly confined to this world… It thinks
that everything is in its own care, following those who say that the visible
world is not subject to any direction. Yet it is unable to escape from
continuing concern and fear for the body. So faintheartedness and sorrow
and despair take hold of it... and worry about illnesses, and concerns
about wants and lack of necessities, and fear of death... For it does
not know how to cast its care onto God, in the assurance of faith in Him.
It therefore engages in contrivances and trickery in all its affairs.
When its contrivances are ineffectual for some reason, it does not see
the secret providence, and fights the people who are obstructing and opposing
it": Mystic Treatises 6, pp. 256-257.