Revoking the ancient curse

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The invocation of the Name revokes the ancient curse as it undoes the fall from grace.  It breaks the curse of evil enchantment with the grace of uncreated love, whose glory was hidden when Beauty was asleep.  The Beauty of glory sleeps forever unless the kiss of grace breaks the curse of enchantment with genuine love.  The dis-enchanting kiss of love awakens beauty of heart, opening the heart’s eye of illumination, deifying all in all with uncreated glory.  Old tales of a fairy god-mother and a sleeping beauty unveil the mystery of awakening from the sleep of spiritual death, without prolonging the curse by divulging mysteries in stupid ways that take the Holy Name of God in vain.  The interpenetration of wisdom and glory is a reciprocal, conjugal coalescence which Patristic wisdom called ‘Co-inherence’, perichoresis.  Perichoretic Co-inherence was transmitted in John 17 without the name, but both name and meaning were taught by Saint Gregory Nazianzus in his fourth century Orations and by Saint Maximus the Confessor in his seventh century ‘Questions to Thalassium’ and ‘Ambigua.’   Saint John of Damascus assimilated Saint Gregory in the light of Saint Maximus in the eighth century, and was so widely read in the West, for example by Saint Albert the Great and Saint Thomas Aquinas, that Co-inherence became the key to perichoretic mysteries in all mediaeval Christendom.

Saint Gregory Nazianzus spoke of a perichoretic Co-inherence of life and death in his Oration 18, envisioning life in death and death in life, a union that did not confuse or dissolve the difference but honoured the union between uncreated life and created mortality asymmetrically.  It is God whose uncreated grace is prior, initiating the mysteries of uncreated union with creation.   In Oration 30.6, Saint Gregory explains how God is all in all (1 Cor 15:28), indicating how deification involves interpenetration of the uncreated with the created but not dissolution into confusion.  This gave Saint Maximus insight into wisdom that saw Co-inherence everywhere, awakening to wisdom’s perichoretic conjunction with glory in all true awakening.  Beauty sleeps until awakened, so that when awakened with a kiss of grace, the evil of the curse is revoked, and theosis deifies in uncreated light unveiling wisdom’s beauty of glory.  Patristic wisdom speaks of a ‘communicatio idiomatum’ or perichoretic exchange of energies and activities that lies at the heart of both illumined theoria and glorifying theosis.  This inspired Co-inherence to embrace both exchange of energies and loving substitution that neither confused nor divided divinity and humanity.

When Beauty awoke from her endless sleep of death, she awoke to endless uncreated light of glory that decisively partakes in eternal life.  Beauty is then able to enter into the spiritual nuptials of the marriage of wisdom and glory.  Old stories might conventionally be called ‘fairy tales’ but it does not follow that they are ‘away with the fairies.’  Wisdom was wise to conceal herself in childhood tales, because they communicate the Spirit’s Co-inherence, remaining an inspiration even in old age.  The Inklings knew that the regeneration of the imagination was crucial in an age that saw itself as cut off from wisdom, even though it was never actually the case that wisdom in the Spirit was in fact cut off from anything.  For wisdom interpenetrates glory everywhere, opening earth to heaven and heaven to earth with her translucent kiss of uncreated light.  The curse of dark but powerful enchantment condemned Beauty to an unnatural sleep until she was awakened, with a kiss, to the conjugal union of wisdom and glory in the Holy of Holies.  The Bridal Chamber of wisdom reveals the Bridal Chamber of glory, a regenerating image that awakens love to the glory of love.  Other tales, just as old, tell of wisdom in other ways, reminding saints they are created in the image of glory.  Beauty wakes in many mysterious ways, opening to glory through many enigmatic means, inspiring many miraculous modes of invocation which revoke the ancient curse.