Sacramental World/Creation
- Feb 13
- 5 min read
“When it comes down to it, this non-iconographic way of seeing the world is by nature unfaithfulness. When I look at creation and I don’t see God, it is like looking at the physical body of a woman in loveless lust and not seeing the fullness.” (Andrew Williams)
“The Enlightenment comes directly out of Scholastic theology and the medieval notion that there is a nature that is all right on its own, to which grace is then added. That is totally heretical, just nuts….no existing thing would exist for even the tiniest moment were it not sustained by uncreated grace. The Enlightenment sciences…take the medieval notion of nature a step farther and say, “Ok, let’s look only at the nature and leave grace to the clergy.”…this wouldn’t make sense. We won’t completely understand anything in nature unless we also see it as an icon and as existing because God’s grace sustains and permeates it.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)
“We are thinking matter, made of the same stuff as everything around us…though we can say much about the activities of our brain, we cannot…actually translate or even correlate that activity with the thing we experience as thought. It is thought itself that we have mythologized and mis-imagined. With this same failure of imagination, we do not understand the fundamental communion of all created things, nor the utterly cosmic nature of the statement that God “became flesh and dwelt among us.” We hear our own voices but do not recognize their kinship to every other sound around us. The sound of my voice and the sound of the river belong to the same class of event. Fantasy novels often do a better job of imagining. Trees speak and animals discuss among themselves. We think to ourselves, “What if trees could actually speak?” But we never seem to think, “What if we actually knew how to listen?” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“These patterns, these descriptions of hierarchies of beings and of angels and of the mountain, of paradise, of temples—all of these descriptions that have been with us since the beginning of known history, that’s really how reality works. Right now is actually an aberration. The modern world is an aberration on that pattern. You could call it the end of that pattern or moving out into the wild of that pattern, but the real pattern is going to come back. It has to, because that’s actually how reality works. So in a way there’s a despair, because we see that everything is falling apart and everything, that society is fragmenting and people are at each other’s throats, not literally yet, thank God, but it seems like that, at some point, will be the case again. So I think there’s a kind of sadness to see that happen, but there’s also hope to know that when it’s really dark and you light a candle, then you will see the candle. I think that that’s also part of it, that the meaning will shine brighter for a lot of people because of the darkness around. And many will ignore it, but some people will… Those that see it will see it. It may be even more than in a world where these patterns are completely traditional and just a forgotten part of how reality works and it just kind of functions like a clock almost. Whereas now people who want to recover an enchanted world have to fight for it. They have to fight in their own lives. They have to fight in their communities to kind of get things going, to get a sense of community, to get a sense of meaning going. But since it is the real pattern, it’s going to shine.” (Jonathan Pageau)
“The medieval man looked at the night sky and wept, feeling himself enclosed in the double darkness of his physical and moral separation from God. But he also believed that the stars were holes in the floor of heaven: that light was streaming in from that world of endless day where all things danced in the delight of creatureliness, were radiant in the changeless light of God.” (Sisters of St. Xenia Skete)
“In all its most ancient traditions Christianity is a sacramental religion. Sacraments form the very life of the Church through which the Spirit of God flows into the world...[a] sacramental view of the world is a world suffused with the grace and love of God. It is a world view as warm as the rationalist view is cold, as profound as the rationalist view is superficial, and as full of meaning and hope as the rationalist view is pointless and despairing.” (Archpriest Lawrence Cross)
“The world, for us, has been “disenchanted,” its words pressed into ever more distinct and discrete meanings. The sacramentality of the world has become opaque to us…The world is not accident and caprice. It is deeply intentional and personal, and conspiring towards our salvation…It is only the dark and callous objectivity of the modern heart that has so disenchanted reality. We imagine ourselves the only sentient beings marooned on a small, blue planet in space. We wonder if there is “life” out there, as if there were anything else anywhere. The world is icon and sacrament.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“So many believe they will find wisdom only by acquiring vast stores of the world’s ever-expanding body of applied knowledge…Ever since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, scientific discoveries have flourished in astonishing and wonderful ways. But has the majority of mankind found true wisdom as a result?...Reverence for God is the supreme wisdom… power and the wisdom…can be gained from the practice of goodness and godliness” (Dynamis 8/20/2019, St. John Chrysostom)
“A man who has within him the Kingdom of Heaven radiates holy thoughts, Divine thoughts. The Kingdom of God creates within us an atmosphere of heaven, as opposed to the atmosphere of hell that is radiated by a person when hades abides in his heart. The role of Christians in the world is to filter the atmosphere on earth and expand the atmosphere of the Kingdom of God.” (Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica)
“The world must be accepted as created by God and having received from God its own meaning and its own calling, which is encapsulated in the incarnation that sanctified not man alone, but through man, all of creation.” (Ivan Ilyin)
"Christianity has had a sacramental view of creation from its very earliest beginnings…In the Christian view, the world we see around us is not only sacred but is also the vehicle for the grace of God...for the Christian, all creation is sacred both because of its creation by God and because it is caught up in the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.” (Archpriest Lawrence Cross)
“The sacramental world is utterly permeated with meaning and spiritual communion…Time moves through a calendar in which the days of the week and the whole of the year are a collection of occasions in which people encounter the reality of Christ’s saving work” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“…the entire world is sacramental. Everything speaks of God. Everything unveils God to us. The true contemplative is a naturalist, a lover of life, a respecter of persons, a diviner of the tangible who sees behind the masks of creation to the Creator.” (Joan Chittister)
“The world is a sacramental marriage of spirit and matter...one of the most beautiful realities is that the whole world is a sacrament.” (Craig Bernthal, Jonathan Jackson)
“…it is important to remember that all of life is given to us in order that it might become "sacramental.” (Fr. John Breck)
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