Religious Symbolism in the Byzantine Rite

Extract

The Eastern Church has never ceased to share in that wonder expressed by St John in his First Epistle concerning the Word of Life, ‘Which we have heard, seen with our own eyes, contemplated, touched with our hands'. That man should handle the Divinity—that the Divinity should stoop and empty itself to the utter annihilation of the Cross, that a meeting between death and life, heaven and hell, creature and Creator should have been made possible within the limits of our human space and time—that the divine energies should have reached and penetrated human frailty—that all this is not a thing of the past but an ever-present reality—the only true reality of this transitory life—such is the intimate conviction expressed in all the liturgical texts of the Byzantine rite and lived by the faithful.

There is only one centre of life: the ceaselessly unfolding, ever present drama of the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which culminates in the revelation of the Blessed Trinity at Pentecost and the birth of the Church—that new creation within which the deification of man, or in other words his union with God, is made possible.