Cosmic Evangelization: How the Pilgrim Church on Earth Facilitates the Conquest of the Celestial Principalities and Powers

 

Cosmic Evangelization 

How the Pilgrim Church on Earth Facilitates the Conquest of the Celestial Principalities and Powers 

I. Introduction

II. Evangelization of the Principalities and Powers

III. The Macrocosm of Cosmic Evangelization: Ecclesiology and Liturgy

IV. The Microcosm of Cosmic Evangelization: Sensus Laicorum and Sensus Fidelium

V. Conclusion

Introduction

In the treatise Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety we discussed how Jesus has conquered the principalities and powers of the creation, “despoiling the principalities and the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, leading them away in triumph”.  In that treatise we discussed how the power of “The Law” and the power of “Death” we sacralized by Christ and are open to use by Catholics as long as they exercise appropriate piety and understand that Christ is truly King.  

We now turn to how much the Church is responsible, as the Body of Christ, for fulfilling that conquest.  That is to say, how much is the Church responsible for sacralizing the principalities and powers and bending them to the will of Christ?  Christians are very aware of our personal need to practice self mastery and strive for moral perfection, yet at the same time rely on Christ for the ultimate achievement.  

When we evangelize, it is often under the impetus of spreading the word of Christ, and we usually perceive that as his personal moral teaching. We are less conscious of our need to strive for a perfect society.  Often we patiently rely on Christ to achieve it at the end.  Rarely when we evangelize do we take the bigger picture into account and evangelize for a just society, seeing that as only necessary inasmuch as it bolster’s a proper personal morality and not with an eye on social structures and how they interact to effect a just society.  But is there even more than this to evangelize?

The purpose of this treatise is to go beyond both personal and social evangelization and strive toward cosmic evangelization.  How can we as a church go beyond simple evangelization of individuals, who need to be changed in order to live the Eschaton?    How can we as a church go beyond a societal reorientation and push for the reconfiguration of the entire cosmos to attempt to conform it according to how it will be reordered in the Eschaton?  If it is still our task to strive, make mistakes and seek God in our personal struggle and the personal conversion of others then it is conceivably true that we have a part to play in the cosmic reconfiguration spoken of in Revelation 20.  It is possible that we have work to do regarding the reconfiguration and/or subjugation of the principalities and powers.

In the first section of this treatise we will focus on the principalities and powers as such.  After challenging our standard assumptions concerning the principalities and powers, we will retrace the history of evangelizing the principalities and powers and supply a backdrop for that evangelization. We will review Saints Paul and Peter’s tact when evangelizing the Gentiles along with how the author of the letter to the Hebrews sought to ground such evangelization by laying out the basic requirements of Christian inculturation.  Then we will discuss the methodology for cosmic evangelization by exploring three basic strategies, fulfillment, conversion and replacement. 

In the next section we will seek to demonstrate how the Church can fulfill this critical aspect of its mission by means of the eastern concept of autocephaly.   We will start by noting how the Protestant Reformation and subsequent counter reformation effectively stymied the free adaptability of the Church to respond to the best evangelical practices of the past toward the newly discovered peoples during the age of exploration.  Since then the progress of both cultural and cosmic evangelization has been halting at best.  Thus the section will discuss the need for the Greater Catholic Church to practice the cosmic evangelization necessary for a total adaptation of reality to Christianity and through adaptation and fulfillment of cosmology, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety transform extraordinary forms or religion to ordinary forms.  This type of adaptation would be officially performed by the magisterium and produce new rites according to the ancient patterns of autocephaly.  

The section following that will cover how the laity in the form of the domestic church and those engaged in consecrate life forms and adapts both culture and cosmos and shares in the evangelical mission of the universal Catholic church.  This section treats the laity as the petri dish for symbology and piety in a given rite according to the sensus laicorum.  The piety and minor ritual developed among the laity is brought to full expression as it is developed by the greater church, and perhaps even the universal church as expressed in the sensus fidelium.

At the end of the final section of the treatise will be a case study concerning the development of marian titles in the last four centuries, especially the titles that begin “Our Lady of” and “Queen of Heaven”.  Through this case study we can begin to unlock the potential of what cosmic evangelization can allow for and how it can help humanity as well as the Church.    

Evangelizing the Principalities and Powers 

Assumptions

To begin our study it may be helpful to lay out the standard assumptions concerning Christianity’s relationship with the “old gods” of Gentile paganism such that we can explore where those assumptions are sufficient and where they could expanded.  The general narrative of salvation history as laid out in scripture lets us know that humanity turned away from God and worshiped multiple false deities as God.  Then God revealed himself to Abraham and chose his descendents to form a bond of covenant with.  

It seems to be assumed that God left all other peoples of the world bereft of guidance or help until his two thousand year plan for Judaism had come to fruition in Christ and his word spread across the Roman Empire in both Europe and Africa.  The standard assumption is that all spiritualities in the pagan world previous to the coming of Christ were completely faulty and to be discarded.  Also any spirituality that developed after the coming of Christ, but not as part of Christianity, is seen as an aberration and completely false.  The job of Christianity is to encounter ancient spiritualities and replace them and also to halt aberrative spiritual flourishes that develop after the coming of the Christ that are not connected to The Church.  This view has a dual supersessionism, first of Judaism, then of the various Gentile philosophies and spiritualities.  

This view seems supported by the apparent destruction and spiritual casting out of the old gods of Rome by Christianity.  That casting out is laid upon the foundation of Christ’s own expulsion of the demonic during his earthly mission in Israel.  However, even in this rigid spiritual view, there are new spiritual developments deemed allowable and are celestially based after a certain point.  That new development takes place in the cult of saints.  Any modestly catechized catholic knows that a saint is a person who lead a life worthy of entrance into heaven.  They are powerful at prayer, and we may imitate them and ask their intercession as fellow sentient beings, even though they abide in the heavens.  Families, nations and cultures can garner a personal connection to the Christian faith in that members of their own have made the journey are looking back to offer intercessory aid.  But any semblance of reverence to the old gods and old spiritual ways is assumed to be completely jettisoned.       

These assumptions demonstrate an obsession with history over spirituality and is actually the result of a secular infection in modern catholicism that worries only of this world and not that of the spiritual world, i.e. the old gods, angels demons etc.  This obsession may spring from the constant proclamation that Jesus is a historical person and not a myth in the New Testament Letters.  These letters often remind us not to trust in myths, calendar and celebrations and cultic practices.  For example, the above quote from Colossians is followed by this advice,

Let no one, then, pass judgment on you in matters of food and drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or sabbath.  These are shadows of things to come; the reality belongs to Christ.  Let no one disqualify you, delighting in self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, inflated without reason by his fleshly mind, and not holding closely to the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and bonds, achieves the growth that comes from God.

If you died with Christ to the elemental powers of the world, why do you submit to regulations as if you were still living in the world?  “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”  These are all things destined to perish with use; they accord with human precepts and teachings

The platonic language in this passage allows for a strict spiritual interpretation against any carnal action, typical of greek anti-corporeality.  An isolated interpretation of the passage leads to a spiritual narrowing so stringent that there is no room left for spiritual “practice”.  

The simple rendering of all these assumptions runs thusly, “Jesus came and informed us completely of the true God, so believe the things he teaches and get rid of everything else.  Get rid of old Jewish practices, they are fulfilled, therefore outdated.  Get rid of Gentile practices, they are completely misguided and evil, never to have been heeded in the first place.  Avoid any development of practice, lest you stray from what was revealed.  Worry about the devil only as much as he tempts you to immorality, but Christ has conquered him and he will be powerless in the end.”  

Our question is, what is left?  How does one practice faith besides practicing personal morality.  In the mind of a catholic who believes this way, participation in the liturgy itself is practically boiled down to morality, following the third commandment.  If following Christ is only morality, personal and/or social, isn’t religion simply secular humanism with a psychological penchant for being other focused by regarding transcendence as well as one’s neighbor?  That seems unacceptable.  The spiritual rejections of this worldview seems to have gone too far.  The entire enterprise of calculated ritual laid out in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment is deemed worthless, and there is not a holistic or catholic approach spirituality at all.  The only thing left is a locked in spirituality that is hyper focused on the needs of those few in the particular situation that it speaks to.  Perhaps those passages that warn against customs and calendars should be reanalyzed for an interpretation that allows for the widest possible application.

Principalities and Powers

In the treatise, Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety, we observed that Holy Death, as a principality or power, is not an enemy of humanity, but an aid to our spiritual fulfillment.  Through the course of the treatise, we made a comparison between Holy Death and The Law as powers that are built into creation in order to bring us back to God.  Once Christ comes and offers us sanctifying grace, we are able to properly utilize these powers for appropriate ends.

Both The Law and Holy Death coddle humanity into a fearful morality before the coming of Christ’s fulfillment.  While the letter of the law and the consequences of death seemed like terrors to humanity when seen as end in and of themselves (either in practice or finality), their fulfillment in Christ reveal a new usefulness.  How this works regarding The Law is exemplified in the dynamic that plays out between the ten commandments and the beatitudes.  It is clear that, though Paul sees us as freed from the bond of The Law, it is still active and useful, just in a way that is reconciled and in sync with the whole vision of the cosmos from the beginning with The Word.  No cleric would see precepts of The Law as a bond we were freed from absolutely.  The principality of The Law is still very active in the Catholic Church even though we have been freed from its bondage, because it is clear that it operates under the dominion of Christ.  

Yet for some reason, when we consider our freedom from the bondage of death our sense is an ultimate conquering and eradication such that we have explaining to do concerning the fact that people still die.  Our conception is that death is a power of evil and Christ has destroyed it utterly. . . . For a proper thanatosian piety, we must understand that death is not demonic but denied by demons and we must understand death as reconciled with all things in Christ. Holy Death has a part to play in Christian piety.             

Both law and death were seen as laborious by Paul and early Christianity absent Christ’s reconciliation.  But with that reconciliation both become servants of Christ’s will for us, and both are glorified by our participation with them.  

 

This same calculation can be made concerning any given principality or power.  It must be remembered that all of creation was good in the beginning, and because of that fundamental nature any given principality or power could possibly experience reconciliation and glorification under the proper circumstances. 

It is common for a certain type of Protestant Christian to criticize a Catholic’s devotion to the Virgin Mary by citing Jeremiah 7:18, “The children gather wood, their fathers light the fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven, while libations are poured out to other gods—all to offend me.”  It must be admitted that it is a stinging critical source.  Yet typical of the Protestant view, it is a hyper focus on one particular passage at the expense of the entire narrative of salvation history.  First it must be remembered that the rules for Jews are different than the rules for Gentiles.  According to Jewish thought, each nation, tribe culture, etc. is assumed to have it’s own way of relating to or entering into covenant with God once the messiah has come.  These covenants would be appropriate to each as long as they were umbrellaed by the covenant entered into with Noah.  For those who believe Christ is the Messiah, the minimum of how each nation should orient to the general Noahide covenant was specified by the council of Jerusalem as laid out in Acts chapter 15.  

Whatever the fire ritual is that is being derided, it may be inappropriate for Jews, but wholly appropriate for certain Gentile nations who have the proper cultural symbolic system.  The same could even conceivably be said for the “queen of heaven”.  The offence here is worship of a being that is not God as if that being where God.  But the forbidding of worship of the principalities and powers does not mandate the forbidding of relationship and mutual edification between humanity and the principalities and powers.  To worship a queen of heaven as God is an offence against the second commandment, just as to worship an earthly monarch as God would be. But to seek aid from a fellow sentient being who happens to be extremely powerful as you each seek to glorify God is not forbidden whether that being is a heavenly being or an earthly monarch.  Not only that, but the messiah ushers in a New Law written on the heart, thus once he comes and the Gentiles come to true worship according to their nation, the laws forbidding participations in pagan cultic action are ineffective, because they are not pagan any more, they are properly calibrated calculated rituals that strive to bring glory to God.  

Paul sums up the problem as well as assumes the license needed for such appropriation in the first chapter of Romans,

The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness.  For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them.  Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened.  While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes.

Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.  They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen

    

This passages seems equally as damning as the passage from Jeremiah.  But what must be focused on is the fact that it is worship that is being condemned.  If one has, “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes” then one has a serious problem.  But that does not mean that one cannot use such symbols in artistic ways to point toward the glory of the one true God.  Nor does it mean that one must refrain from amiable relations with angels, principalities and powers if the relationship is mutually edifying and aimed toward the glory of God.

In the treatise Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety we discussed the nature of such principalities and powers.  It may be helpful to quote at length,

 What exactly a principality or power is is mildly controversial.  It seems that when Paul speaks of “thrones, dominions principalities and powers” he is talking about angelic beings who have some sort of authority in the cosmos.  These beings seem to have sentience.  It’s also apparent that some of these beings are in rebellion against God in much the same way humanity is, but since they seem to be advanced of human nature, their potential for destruction outstripes our own.  Thus the easiest way to understand principalities and powers is simply to understand that there are angels and demons in the world.  With that it must be understood that these principalities and powers have some sort of sway over humans, it is obvious that our free will is not absolute and because of this we can deduce their existence .

In moderns times it is more fashionable to see these principalities and powers as psychological forces that limit our freewill.  Rudolph Bultmann definitely saw Paul’s powers as mythical beings to be “de-mythologized” into the dangers, tribulations, distresses, and temptations that threaten a Christian’s sense of religious self.  Also in modern times it is not unheard of to take Hendrikus Berkhof’s point of view which is also more anthropocentric and see these principalities and powers as the social forces that structure humanity.  These structures are neither good nor evil, but can be turned either way depending on the deep rootedness of original sin.  That is to say, it is the individual human's response to these powers that makes them good or evil.  Lastly, there is the less useful modern view that these principalities and powers are simply the impersonal laws and forces that govern the universe as a whole, for example the laws of physics or perhaps a behaviorist psychological point of view.  Even here, the Christian may interpret the powers as such, yet still allow them to sing the glories of God through their beauty. 

   

Below in the same treatise Saint Augustine’s metric for deciding whether such powers were for good or evil was discussed using an excerpt from  Book X of City of God,

Augustine’s calculation for a spiritual power being an angel or a demon is whether it draws worship to itself or to God.  If the power were interpreted as impersonal, as Berkoch states, then it could do either depending on the individual human relationship to the power.  But if the power is a sentient or personal being, then it would well have intention to do one or the other.   

 Indeed it is quite possible that when Paul urges Titus to, “ Remind them to be under the control of magistrates and authorities, to be obedient, to be open to every good enterprise” he is not talking about civil authorities, but the celestial principalities and powers.  Mutual cooperation is not outside the scope of Christian cosmology.  If one can submit to a temporal authority and find ways of showing kings and presidents respect such that the respect does not equal worship, that seems to be unquestionably Christian.  If a people can use that respect to form a just society, or a person can leverage respect to garner edifying favors from the temporal powers, all the better.  Why wouldn’t all of this work for the celestial principalities and powers as well.  All authority is Given to Christ, and in the end all authority will ultimately be ordered to his good purpose.  How much is that process or ordering within the scope of our moral responsibility as individuals and as a church?

Any derision such as one finds in 2 Peter concerning “cleverly devised mythologies” should take context into account.  The author was drawing the reader's attention to the historical reality of Christ and his own status as an eyewitness.  Even if myth is not historical it is powerful.  Thus if Bultmann is correct, then myth plays into the psychological needs within the human and within humanity.  

But which is it, force or personal being?  The ancient world conceived of two types of “god”.  The first was the animistic variety.  These were personal deities and able to be personally appealed to or manipulated by cultic practice.  The second was the dynamistic variety, which amounts to an impersonal force.  This variety is a force of nature that can only be manipulated with knowledge and thus implies magical use or manipulation.  

From the point of view of Christian cosmology, the dynamistic powers are the forces or elements of nature, put into creation from the beginning.  The animistic powers are the angelic beings who either serve God or have turned away.  Interestingly according to Christian cosmology, a new class of heavenly being was allowed for with the coming of the messiah.  When Christ opened the gates of heaven, he allowed the soul of any ancestor who repented with the harrowing of hell into heaven.  He also allows any Christian soul who dies justified into heaven as well, either immediately or after being purged of the need for temporal punishments.  These powerful beings, the saints, also have dominion and responsibility.  They are different than the ancient principalities and powers because they are terrestrially historical and more relatable.  One relates to them not only by mythology, symbols and cultic ritual, but also by historical awareness.

In the modern secular world, we have all the same ideas in play.  Our cosmology is thoroughly dynamistic.  Our scientific worldview see the cosmos as dead matter imbued with impersonal forces, natural elements.  Thus we take a more “magical” tact when we seek to manipulate impersonal forces.  Arthur C. Clarke was far more correct than he knew in his famous quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” because technology serves the same purpose as magic, the manipulation of the impersonal forces of nature by knowledge and elements. 

These are woven together by means of the overarching principality of the modern world, The Economy.  It is hard to tell if this power is regarded as animistic or dynamistic.  It depends on the source.  But either way this power combines and concentrates the abilities of both science and the state in such a way as to be powerfully and terrifyingly effective.  Before such power how can one stand?  Once one realizes that these forces, the natural elements, the state and the economy, are our new modern secular gods, then the evangelization of the cosmos as we are about to describe it, and the striving for social justice may not be different things in the modern secular world. 

Either way all the same problems that the ancient Christians had with the ancient pagan Gods, we should have with our modern god.  Economy is certainly the thing that we turn to nationally and personally when we need help as opposed to God.  It is certainly the power that we see as immediately effective in place of God.  So much so that often our prayers in modern times run something like this, “God, please let me win the lottery so I don’t have anything to worry about anything anymore.”  We forget that it is God who is supposed to ultimately protect us from all anxiety, not the demigod, The Economy.  As we move into the next part we will explore how to go about evangelizing the celestial principalities and powers.

The Backdrop for Cosmic Evangelization

   

The general belief of western Christianity is that the fall of humanity disoriented all of creation, throwing off the balance of the entire cosmos.  Saint Paul says in Romans 8, 

For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. 

It is certainly the job of Christ to glorify all of creation at the Eschaton.  But as we have already noted, he glorifies our bodies as part of the process, that does not imply that we have no work to do toward perfection.  The author of Colossians states, “And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds he [Jesus] has now reconciled in his fleshly body through his death”  The author is speaking of the Christians reading the letter, but our query is whether or not his body on earth now, the Church, has a similar role concerning the principalities and powers who turned away.   The interesting thing about the passage quoted from Romans 8 is that it hints at a cosmos thrown eskew, and how the cosmos are waiting for the “revelation of the children of God” [plural] not “The Son of God” [singular].  

How does The Church as the “children of God” do this?  Paul’s own missionary activity vaguely hint at it.  It is not simply a matter of preaching morality, but of a practice of calculated ritual.  They certainly engaged in agapic love feasts as is attested to in the corinthian correspondence.  Yet , Paul keeps the standard Jewish belief that Gentiles have their own appropriate ways to connect to God.  Just because Jesus was Jewish does not mean that Gentiles need to become Jewish.  Thus in his missionary activity Paul seemed antinomian.  He does not worry overmuch about Jewish law unless he is with Jews. 

Paul goes native, and brings whatever culture he is in into conformity with Christ.

Although I am free in regard to all, I have made myself a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible.  To the Jews I became like a Jew to win over Jews; to those under the law I became like one under the law—though I myself am not under the law—to win over those under the law.  To those outside the law I became like one outside the law—though I am not outside God’s law but within the law of Christ—to win over those outside the law.  To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak. I have become all things to all, to save at least some.  All this I do for the sake of the gospel, so that I too may have a share in it.          

This adaptation took on the tenor of adapting the local practice, and once one can admit this the more one is able to see 1Corinthians 8-9 as a unit, and not a set of disconnected points.  Paul begins by speaking about vegetarianism and meat sacrificed to idols.  It seems that some people have been dining in temples during their rituals.  During this passage Paul admits that there are many gods in heaven and on earth, but only one true God.  He sides with those who dine in the temple regarding the carnivorous activity, yet says that if the vegetarians cannot come to terms with this as an acceptable practice, then one should not offend in their presence.  Yet he feels the eating of meat as part of pagan practices is acceptable, and even to be promoted.

In the modern mind this may seem to come down to a matter of dietary pleasure and preference, but this is not the case at all.  These missionaries seemed to be participating in the cultic rituals in the pagan temples.  It is obvious why this would be offensive, but Paul maintains that those who are offended have the “weaker conscience” and should only be catered to in their presence so as not to lead them astray or offend their conscience.

This seems to be the end of the discussion, and Paul seems to launch into a disconnected defense of his personal wages.  But after the financial talk we have the above quote about all things to all people, creating a staggering series of non sequiturs.  I would argue that these sections form a unit concerning how Paul and his team missionized, the criticisms of the “pious” about his activity and his defense of it.  Again our image is of him going into pagan lands and rationally preaching, and maybe some of his team or follower’s drew reasoned conclusions about the fact that these “god” weren’t real, so they could eat meat because it tasted good.  

On the contrary it actually seemed that they were utilizing the cultic practice concerning the principalities and powers, and channeling their devotional aspirations toward the all powerful God through or by utilizing those principalities in the same way a Jew would use the principality of The Law, all of these being under the dominion of Christ the King. those powers. Paul asserts 

So about the eating of meat sacrificed to idols: we know that “there is no idol in the world,” and that “there is no God but one.  “Indeed, even though there are so-called gods in heaven and on earth (there are, to be sure, many “gods” and many “lords”), yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things are and through whom we exist . . . But make sure that this liberty of yours in no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak. If someone sees you, with your knowledge, reclining at table in the temple of an idol, may not his conscience too, weak as it is, be “built up” to eat the meat sacrificed to idols?  Thus through your knowledge, the weak person is brought to destruction, the brother for whom Christ died.  

              

It appears that the missionary tactic of going into temples and participating in the cult was causing a problem, and Paul’s advice is to downplay this activity in front of those “not ready” for it.  Yet we propose that the financial talk that follows is not a defence of wages, but is a defence of this missionary activity.  Paul seems to have been derided for this practice concerning his mission to the Gentiles and in the course of that criticism he was defamed as lacking apostolic rank.

Paul quickly defends himself by asserting his freedom and casting similar suspicions on other apostles.  He most certainly threw Peter under the bus for engaging in similar practices in the letter to the Galatians.  He thus asserts his freedom to do the same.  He then quotes a series of scriptures meant to show his freedom.  The allegory is based around the quote, “you shall not muzzle and ox while it is treading out grain.”  But the payment here is neither grain, nor money.  Paul’s interpretation is that he and his team are the oxen, and the “fruit” is their convert’s.  Therefore they should be unmuzzled (unrestricted) when they seek to convert.  That is, they need to be able to engage in pagan practices and convert those people, and possibly those gods.  Peter seemed to have the same strategy, also in private away from the eyes of scandalized Jewish Christians.

Paul goes on to explain how he has not used his “right” of claiming converts in that, as he said elsewhere, he “sows, Apollos waters and God gives the growth”.  This seems to be an attempt to neutralize any talk that he is personally ineffective.   It is from there that he launches into his “all things to all people” description of his work.  The entire section seems to be a defense of eating with Gentiles, which is scandalous, because that eating would take place as part of their cultic rituals to their gods.  But, despite his advice toward being discreet,  Paul seemed to be using that ritual and those “gods” or principalities to bring the Gentiles to a greater understanding of God.  

Given this entire backdrop, one can return to the previous quote from Colossians, which begins, “Let no one pass judgment on you in matters of food and drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or sabbath.”  In that passage he he, again, derides worship of angelic powers, but his statement is not to disown these powers or any respect toward them, any more that he derides respect to The Law.  It is just that these things are now to be subjected to Christ and offered as Glory to the Father.

This exact methodology can be seen with greater clarity in Acts, when Peter converts Cornelius’ house.  This episode begins with dual visions had by both Cornelius and Peter.  Peter’s vision comes from God and concerns the cleanliness of all animal to consume.  The tag line here is, “What God has made clean, you are not to call profane.”  The other vision comes to Cornelius.  He is described as Centurian, yet he is also a God fearing man who supports the Jewish temple.  An angel of God comes to him and tells him to send for Peter.

The first curious part of this story is which angel?  Acts does not say.  Above we reminded the reader that Augustine claims the old gods are the angels and demons.  The difference is whether they draw worship to God or to themselves.  In this case, since this man was a centurion, it is likely he had a cultic center in his house.  The “angel” here may be the very “god” that he worships.  If this god or angel were one and the same, then this angel had already prepared him for Christ’s coming to the extent that Cornelius recognized that participation in the Jewish temple was a worthy activity.

Peter sits confused about the meaning of his vision, which seems a pretty plain allowance of expanded diet, when messengers from Cornelius come and summon him.  When Peter arrives he must point Cornelius’s eyes to God, Peter must forbid Cornelius from bowing to him.  Peter inquires as to why he was sent and Cornelius explains his vision.  After a brief yet very effective sermon, the Gentiles are possessed by the Holy Spirit and Peter orders the Baptism based on this evidence.  Peter stays with them a few days.

Our contention is that is was the “angel” or “god” of that house that brought them to the point of such quick conversion. It would be hasty to assume that they put off all rites concerning their respect of this god/angel who brought them to the true God.  Peter stayed with them a few days, presumably eating with them, and it is possible that eating entailed celebratory feasts directed at gratitude to the angel who appropriately directed them, i.e. pagan rites.  Those rites would certainly involve ritual sacrificial feasts, that Peter would have partaken in.  Peter’s new knowledge from his vision is that nothing that God makes clean is to be called profane.  This applies to both food and feasting, as well as gods or angels.  Peter’s activity there is why the Jewish Christians were so eager to press him about his experience.  His answer after retelling the in his vision how no food, nor person (nor their rites and “gods”?) were unclean is as follows, “If then God gave them the same gift he gave to us when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be able to hinder God?”

The matter of dining with Gentiles is a matter of expanding rites beyond Jewish cultic practices into the Gentile world.  In their missionary activity, Paul and Peter did not just adapted worship for missionary activity as a matter of skillful means, but fulfilled the cultic practices of the Gentiles and validated how they strive for God in their own way.  Why would we assume angels were only active in Israel? If Gentiles perceived them as gods, then these angels would need to slowly but surely prepare them for the truth.  If the Gentiles were under the spell of demons, they could still be converted.  Is it possible that by that conversion the demons could be converted to?  Indeed “cult”, literally meaning “care” of the gods implies some sort of dependence on the human by the deity.  Could it be that how we interact with the sentient spiritual beings affects them is serious ways?  If they need our cult, can we convert them by it?   

  Within the first three hundred years of Christian history, worship was adapted to Greco-Roman culture as a Gentile empire.  Freed from Jewish law it took on the trappings of Pagan Rome.   We pointed out in Sacramental Cosmology

 

 In the Protestant mind there is a basic assumptive narrative that explains the existence of the Roman Catholic Church.  First there was Christ and his apostles, they were very much like modern protestants.  They weren’t Jewish, because Paul said they didn’t have to follow the Old Law.  At the same time, they weren’t in any way like the pagans, because Jesus said to love God with all your heart, not false gods.  But then Christianity spread into the Roman Empire and changed.  If they are astute in history, they may even reference Constantine.  At that point Christianity becomes corrupted from it’s original form and turned into a pagan based religion that used pagan rituals.  The best evidence of this is the Eucharist as it is manifest in the more ritualized form of the late medieval period.  

   

It was also demonstrated in that treatise that a ritualized form of the Eucharist was manifest from the beginning as the sacrificial rite present in the living temple of the Body of Christ, the Church.  That fundamental or nuclear ritual of Christianity takes on various forms in various rites of ancient Christianity.  But Christianity continued to adapt to Rome and the northern tribes as it spread through Europe and Africa.  One easy way to see this is the adaption of the language of the Bible, which moves from Hebrew to Greek in the New Testament, then to Latin in the vulgate and finally to the germanic languages and beyond as Christianity progresses.  In the Catholic understanding the inspiration is translatable because the Spirit guides the magisterium as they validate translations.  

For Christian Europe, the same was true of culture and cult of the principalities and powers.  Christianity took on a complicated missionary endeavor which consisted of revealing the benevolent angelic powers as such, as opposed to God, in the tribes where they were active, and either driving out or converting the demonic powers.       

The Methodology for Cosmic Evangelization

How does one convert the powers?  The answer hinges on the “cult of the gods”, the kind of thing that drives Protestants to despise Catholicism.  Protestants believe that the original missionary activity was a process of rational debate, mostly concerning historical facts about Jesus and exercise of proper morality.  That may have been part of it, yet, when Paul seek to missionize the Greeks, they are unimpressed with his debating premises and skills.  Instead his most effective missionary tactic was through the use of the existing calculated ritual that the Gentiles used to commune with their powers.  

If cult does imply care, and somehow those gods are reliant on us, then what Jesus says in Matthew 18 may be more impactful than it appears at face value

“If your brother sins [against you], go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.  If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’  If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church.  If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.  

Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.  Again, [amen,] I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father.  For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

        

There is a preference here for converting a sinner by intimate personal relationship. And then within the ordinary means of the Church.  Yet when that fails, you are to treat them as a Gentile or tax collector.  The standard interpretation here is some sort of shunning.  But Jesus shunned neither tax collectors nor Gentiles.  In fact he specifically dined with tax collectors, a cause of scandal, and healed the children of Gentiles.  It is after this advice that we get the interesting segway to “holding things bound on heaven and earth” by means of collective prayer.   If the “brother” is a brother by being part of the human family, and the sin is worshiping false gods, then this passage is a fascinating study.  It is no longer simple interpersonal moral offence but a missionizing strategy utilizing their cult and transforming it to an indicator of Christ’s kingship and a method for bringing glory to the one true God.   By this the evangelist is able to hold their gods bound on earth and in heaven, subjecting them to the kingship of Christ.  This interpretation allows for a smoother understanding of yet another non sequitur between moral catechesis and this odd “holding bound” situation.  

If what we discussed in Sacramental Cosmology is true, then the temple of Christianity is the body of believers, who are living stones.  What Christ seems to be saying, in this most Jewish gospel, is that at a certain point, when evangelizing, you must decide that ordinary methods aren’t working, and establish a new way to approach the pagan.  By those methods you can draw that person to the truth.  If you can bring them around the way Jesus brought around tax collectors, dining with them, or pagans, associating with them, then what you hold bound on earth, the humans, will be helped bound in heaven, the “gods”.  This would be because by the cultic activities of the humans, those gods subsist.  If the people are brought to the truth, then those spiritual beings would have little choice to follow as well, because in some way they depend on their cult.

Saint Augustine is no fan of the multiplicity involved in pagan worship.  In City of God he denounces paganism in a damning rebuke in order to cast suspicion of calamities that have befallen Rome off of Christianity.  He roundly points out the foolishness of worshiping multiple deities.  Yet at the same time he cannot disavow the existence of angels and demons, the old gods. He sees the rites associated with them as “buffoonery” and he may be correct to a point, but what Christ seems to hint at in the above quotes is, at a certain point you may need to enter in buffoonery.  Saint Paul has no problem admitting such about himself in 1 Corinthians.

Thus what we have in European Christianity is a sacralizing of pagan Rome.  The Temple of Diana the virgin mother becomes the home of Mary the Virgin Mother of God.  What is held bound on earth, is held bound in Heaven and The Virgin Mother reigns a queen of heaven.  Far better this, with a proper theological understanding that points to the one true God, than a people lost to God.  Later below we will discuss how the Catholic church’s view of Mary queen of heaven is a fulfillment of all mother goddess typologies that prepared the pagans for the coming of Christ  

Atlas becomes Saint Christopher, the one who bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. A name change is indicative in the Bible for one who has a conversion experience, for example Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, Saul to Paul, or us at our baptism and confirmation.  Once the name is changed the myth is altered to be acceptable to Christian cosmology and the conversion process of the cosmic power is almost complete.  The last thing to do is reorient cultic activity to from being focused on the angelic being to being focused on how the angelic being brings us to the true God. Despite the obvious fact that St. Christopher is in no way historical, his cult still persists, because that myth carries power.  And with the new Christian adaptation, it carries effective and proper power.  Couple the adaptation of the myth with the adaptation of the cultic activity to be appropriately Christian and one has effective calculated ritual.  This is allowed because the temple is the body of believers and their sacrificial acts.

Thus if one is dealing with animistic powers, if they rely on our cult, and demand allegiance to themselves, we as Christians have an opportunity to save the people by orienting them to proper cult that syncs their myth and action with Christianity.  This is human evangelization.  But as their cult changes, if the spiritual being wishes to benefit for whatever support the human “cult” offers, it must also act according to proper Christian orientation and then point glory to the one true God.  Without submitting to this, the spiritual being is not getting whatever it is they need from the “cultic” activity.  If the activity ceases, they cease, thus whatever is bound on earth is bound in heaven and whatever is loosed on earth is loosed in heaven.  

It is now that we can return to Saint Paul’s, “are you not aware that you will judge the angels?”  are they worthy of keeping around?  Can their cult be adapted to point the glory to God, if it doesn’t already?  If not, the cult diminishes, as does the power of that spiritual principality.  

But what if those powers are evil?  Such as death?  We already pointed in Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety out that death is not an evil power, but a power subject to Christ, like all the others.  What about the devil?  He is still in rebellion!  True, but even in his evil purpose he serves God’s greater plan.  He was originally good, and even now he strengthens our ability to be strong in our goodness by his temptation.  If calculated ritual could be attuned to recognize the devil’s role in God’s plan, even against his own demonic desire, could he be evangelized?  Maybe not, but we seek to affirm the goodness in our human neighbors in order to bring them to God’s love, why not the demons, who were also created good and are mislead.  Could we hold them bound in heaven, by holding their followers bound on earth through the same creative evangelization utilized by Peter and Paul?   

This flip flop is completely appropriate to Christian power dynamics.  The greatest serves the least.  In a perfect world, the job of the powers is to draw us to God, as Paul points out in the first chapter of Romans.  They, being greater, serve us.  Just as the author of Hebrews says, “But to which of the angels has he ever said: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool?”  Are they not all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”  It goes on to say, “In “subjecting” all things [to him], he left nothing not “subject to him.” Yet at present we do not see “all things subject to him,” In a post lapsarian world, everything is eskew, but with the coming of Christ, we, his children are struggling to bring ourselves and those powers, back into good relationship with God.

Throughout this treatise we will explore three possible ways that one can evangelize using concerning cosmic evangelization of angelic powers.  The first is cosmic evangelization by fulfillment.  This type of cosmic evangelization seeks to recognize those powers who have good influences and work with the Holy Spirit as preparers for Christ.  This would put them in the ranks of angels under the leadership of St. Michael and under the authority of Christ.  This is the tact one would take if the angelic power is one who recognizes the kingship of Christ.  It is recognizable because the message and method of the extraordinary religion would be easily sycranizable with Christianity, with minimal aberration from the gospel. That aberration would be due to human misunderstanding and/or the angelic power meeting the people where they were at.  Augustine is not overly impressed with the ritual of the pagans, but his quote in City of God concerning Labeo may be helpful for us,

Labeo, whose learning makes him an authority on such points, is of opinion that the distinction between good and evil deities should find expression in a difference of worship; that the evil should be propitiated by bloody sacrifices and doleful rites, but the good with a joyful and pleasant observance, as, e.g. (as he says himself), with plays, festivals, and banquets. All this we shall, with God's help, hereafter discuss.

 Though Augustine does not seem to be a fan of cosmic evangelization his quote is helpful.  In the case of a benevolent angelic guardian, cosmic evangelization is only the matter of calibrating the rite and ritual misguided humans have developed in order expresses proper dulia concerning the angelic principality and aim latria at God.  

The second tactic of cosmic evangelization is conversion.  This is applied in a situation where the power is a malevolent rebellious being who is hindering humanity's quest for God by turning human devotion toward themselves for some kind of gain.  This was certainly the belief of the babylonians.  In their flood myth the destruction is so great that almost all humans are destroyed.  The gods seem to then undergo great suffering at the lack of sacrifices offered.  “Like sheep, they could only fill their windpipes with bleating. / Thirsty as they were, their lips / Discharged only the rime of famine". When Atrahasis, the only human left, offers a sacrifice, the hungry gods smell the fragrance and gather "like flies over the offering."  It may not be physical hunger, but more of a spiritual or emotional hunger that celestial being feel, like humans, the need for recognition or praise.  If that recognition or praise is dulia, all is well.  If they seek latria, they are demonic and in error, the same way a human is subject to pride.  In this case our goal is cosmic evangelization by conversion, that is, to change the cult of that deity and actualize it, that is, turn it to its true end, and bring glory to God.  The rite and ritual of the humans is changed to offer dulia to the angelic power and latria to God.  In this case the principality can either accept appropriate dulia and come under the power of Christ the king, drawing humanity to God, or be self banished from cultic activity.  Again humans judge the angels, what is bound on Earth is bound in heaven and what is loosed on Earth is loosed in heaven.  

The last variety of cosmic evangelization is replacement.  If a malevolent celestial power is ultimately rebellious or unable to convert, the evangelizer can exchange from a demonic celestial power for a  saintly celestial being who resides in the heavens and intercedes for us.  The ritual activity is still shifted from latria to dulia, but the heavenly being is also shifted from angelic to human, a reminder that it is the humans who are judging the angels.    

A poorly developing example of the process of cosmic evangelization is the work done concerning the Seven African Powers of the Yoruba tribe of west Africa.  Here an amalgamation of cosmic evangelization tactics are getting confused in just such a way that one may need to revisit the letter to the Hebrews for guidance.  The images of the powers were replaced with images of prominent saints but the names and mythology remained identical. This lead to poor synchronicity and an confusion between the tactics of fulfillment and replacement, the two ends of the cosmic evangelical spectrum.  

In a case such as The Seven African Powers at this point the process from the Catholic end fulfillment and replacement are in an ineffective and inappropriate hybrid that does not suite the purpose of cosmic evangelization.  If inculturation were appropriately executed to continue the calculated rituals could become appropriate liturgical offices for that culture and that Church could become its own rite through a process of autocephaly as will be discussed in the next section.  The end result of cosmic evangelization is to transform an extraordinary religion to an ordinary religion, not develop hybrids or “new religions”.

All of this most likely seems archaically pagan to any modern Christian.  We don’t often consider demonic or angelic forces having much to do with our lives, but instead believe in a universe that is driven by impersonal forces.  Traditional Christianity advised against this as an exclusive view, but even so, there is a way that we can bring the impersonal under the power of a personal heavenly being.  

We are subject to many powers that are dynamistically impersonal.  As we noted earlier, our main gods are the polis, the natural powers or elements, and the economy.  How can any sense of calculated ritual bring them into subservience to the one true God?  How could we even effectively come into relationship with them?  The answer comes in dominion by Christ through the communion of saints.  The saints abide in the heavens with the ability to pray with us, yet being spiritually advanced, they are extremely effective at intercession.  In such a case, we ask and they, out of compassion pray.  This is easily the case concerning the dynamistic powers, such that various saints gain patronage over certain dynamistic domains.  Once again, we judge the celestial beings in that we ask their favor and maneuver them by appeal to their compassion.  It is doubtful that Anthony of Padua perceived himself as a finder of lost items?  Doubtful, but there he is, in the heavens responding to our pleas for intercession.  Jude most likely knew nothing of cancer in his life, yet how we call on his aid, as the saint is moved by compassion to intercede he is placed over that realm.  

When we call on their aid we do so in linguistic plea, and if we are thoroughly Catholic, in calculated ritual.  This ritual may concern acts of charity, novenas, or artistic offerings regarding statues and incense.  This is sacralizing the secular, a realization that what we perceive as “secular”, the powers of the elements, the polis, the economy, are actually dynamistic powers to be tamed and brought to a relational position by means of the saints intercession coupled with just and moral our action.  Thus the economy, for example, can be brought around to glorifying God itself instead of glorifying itself.  This sacralization of the secular is the only way to thwarts the true heresy of “modernism”, which drives us toward worshiping of these principalities and powers, the elements, the polis, autonomy, and reason, and the economy as gods in and of themselves instead of taming them, evangelizing them and allowing them to draw us to the true God.  Inasmuch as we are able to do that we as the Body of Christ have played our part in subjecting the principalities and powers to his will. 

All of this fits into how Blessed Paul VI’s outlined the church’s call in his 1975 apostolic exhortation,  “Evangelii Nuntiandi” (“Evangelization in the Modern World”). 

All this could he expressed in the following words: what matters is to evangelize man's culture and cultures (not in a purely decorative way, as it were, by applying a thin veneer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to their very roots), in the wide and rich sense which these terms have in Gaudium et spes, always taking the person as one's starting-point and always coming back to the relationships of people among themselves and with God.

 

The Gospel, and therefore evangelization, are certainly not identical with culture, and they are independent in regard to all cultures. Nevertheless, the kingdom which the Gospel proclaims is lived by men who are profoundly linked to a culture, and the building up of the kingdom cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture or cultures. Though independent of cultures, the Gospel and evangelization are not necessarily incompatible with them; rather they are capable of permeating them all without becoming subject to any one of them.

 

The split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time, just as it was of other times. Therefore every effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures. They have to be regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel.

Cosmic evangelization is not purely decorative.  It is the process of transforming an extraordinary means of religion, as was described in the treatise Ordinary and Extraordinary Religion, into an ordinary religion.  If there is a “split between gospel and culture” then it is a split that needs reconciliation for a practicing Christian.

Thus far in this treatise we have discussed the process of evangelizing the principalities and powers.  We have discussed the standard assumption concerning the casting out of the old gods, a process which itself lead, in its post enlightenment understanding, to the desacralization of the West.  The assumption is the old gods are fake and therefore to be ignored and any understanding of them forgotten.  We then entered into a discussion based on the treatise Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety concerning the nature of the principalities and powers, the gods the angels and demons.  After a filling out our understanding of the powers we discussed the methodology of evangelizing the principalities and powers.  It was our contention that this was the evangelization tactic of Saint Paul, and more haphazardly used by Saint Peter.  We discussed how, though altering of calculated ritual, the powers could reach appropriate effectiveness in their mission to direct us to God, and even rebellious powers could be brought into submission and possibly conversion.  We lastly turned to the dynamic powers, the forces of nature, and discussed how our religion, which seeks to personally relate to the “other” can do so even in this venue, through ritual and invocation of the saints, who would bring the non-personal elemental forces under their domain.

The last question concerning the evangelization of the principalities and powers is how much do we force change in the rituals attached to them and how much to we retain?  The easy answer is that whatever draws one away from God must be stripped and whatever draws one toward God needs to be retained.  Yet we as human creatures want it to be our way and we desire to coerce others into our practice.  Thus some of the original Jewish Christians wanted Gentiles to practice Jewish law.  Is it the same now?  Do we as Roman Catholics foist our Roman way onto peoples where it is not the most effective?  Do we trust the principalities and powers who speak congruently with our own angelic powers and seek to allow them to draw those peoples to to Christ, through whom they reach the Father?  Do we seek to evangelize the principalities and powers who have gone astray and point out their original goodness and how they may even now fit into God’s plan?

Jesus himself allows us to know how far we are to go in allowing a culture to retain its calculated ritual as it embraces Christianity.

You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.  You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.  Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house.  Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.

              

In this quote two metaphors are given for the believer that we will briefly examine in the light of evangelization.   When salt is put into food, it does not change the food into salt, rather it brings out the flavor that is dormant in the food.  When a Christian goes into a non Christian culture his job is not to change the culture in toto, but to bring out the Christianity dormant in the culture.  Not enough salt and the food is bland and inedible.  Too much salt and the food is unpalatable to the eater.  The same can be said for any given instantiation of Christianity.  Not enough of the fundamentals and  the evangelizer has not truly converted the culture.  Too much and the culture will not recognize the message as relevant.  The job of light is to illuminate other things so that the observer can see them, not to an an end of itself.  The job of the evangelizer is not to lay a heavy burden onto a foreign culture, but to illumine how that culture can truly worship God.  

The effective evangelizer of peoples, cultures, and principalities will seek to take the ritual system of a peoples and emphasis and bring to completion where that system indicates experiencing God through Christ.  For example, most cultures have a sacrificial system in play.  This system should be developed and confirmed according to to the paschal mystery.  In Hebrews the Author seems bent on the oneness of the sacrifice of Christ.  But he states this reduction as his purpose in chapter 5 after explaining how Christ is a priest according to the order of Melchizedek,   

he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, declared by God high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

About this we have much to say, and it is difficult to explain, for you have become sluggish in hearing.  Although you should be teachers by this time, you need to have someone teach you again the basic elements of the utterances of God. You need milk, [and] not solid food.  Everyone who lives on milk lacks experience of the word of righteousness, for he is a child.  But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties are trained by practice to discern good and evil.

To claim Christ as a priest according to the order of Melchizedek is certainly a rhetorical device that downplays his non levitical heritage, but bolsters his priesthood.  But at the same time it affirms a priesthood that is Gentile and acts, as is pointed out in Genesis 14, as cultic practices aimed at the “God Most High”.  That cultic practice utilized bread and wine.  This seems to affirm adaptation of Gentile sacrificial forms, which the author seems to have little problem with, at least no more problems than he has with the Hebrew sacrificial system.  He states later

Now every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus the necessity for this one also to have something to offer. If then he were on earth, he would not be a priest, since there are those who offer gifts according to the law.  They worship in a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary, as Moses was warned when he was about to erect the tabernacle. For he says, “See that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.”  Now he has obtained so much more excellent a ministry as he is mediator of a better covenant, enacted on better promises. 

His “more excellent ministry” is as follows,

Every priest stands daily at his ministry, offering frequently those same sacrifices that can never take away sins.  But this one offered one sacrifice for sins, and took his seat forever at the right hand of God; now he waits until his enemies are made his footstool.

This passage may also shed light on what he wanted to say that was so “difficult to explain”.  He seems to be boiling down the sacrificial system to its most efficacious point, the true and onetime sacrifice of Jesus.  Yet that boiling down is not incongruent with inculturation of rites, and evangelization of principalities and powers through their rites.  He does not say that rites and priests are to be abolished, he simply asserts that the most effective sacrifice is Christs.  The last line of the previous quote hints that Christ is “waits until his enemies are made his footstool”.  Why is he waiting?  Isn’t it done?  Doesn’t he do it?  The reason the author may be distilling the sacrificial system is because people are misapplying the effective tactic of cosmic evangelization and falling into rites that offer latria to gods, or at least don’t effectively communicate dulia.  The states in his conclusion,

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teaching.  It is good to have our hearts strengthened by grace and not by foods, which do not benefit those who live by them.  We have an altar from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat.  The bodies of the animals whose blood the high priest brings into the sanctuary as a sin offering are burned outside the camp.  Therefore, Jesus also suffered outside the gate, to consecrate the people by his own blood.  Let us then go to him outside the camp, bearing the reproach that he bore.  For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.  Through him [then] let us continually offer God a sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name.  

  

His desire is to refocus on the paschal mystery and how any sacrificial system setup on earth before and after the coming of the Christ is a foreshadowing of the ultimate and one true sacrifice of the priest and victim, Christ.  It is possible that over zealous missionaries did get carried away with rites, and became entangled into worship of angelic beings as opposed to Christ who they were supposed directing the devotees to.  This same danger is alive and well today and perhaps our Protestant brothers are not out of line with criticisms of certain catholic devotions. 

But even in this passage, there is the strange non sequitur of Jesus “going outside the gate” coupled with an exhortation for us to do the same.  There seems in his thought to be a symbiosis between Jesus’ heavenly sacrifice, and Moses’ Law based sacrifice and Melchizedek's Gentile sacrificial structure.  Melchizedek was “outside” the gate of Jerusalem as well when he performed his sacrifice, and his rite is literally outside of the fold of levitical law.  Christ as referenced to both he and Moses shows the validity of earthly sacrificial systems of both the Gentile and Levitical Variety as possible terrestrial ways of experiencing the heavenly sacrifice of Christ.  Again he seems to be quite aware that Christ is waiting for the subjugation of these powers, which indicates that someone has work to do regarding them. 

The author of Hebrews seems to have the opposite problem as Saint Paul.  Saint Paul has people effectively fulfilling pagan rituals and evangelizing the principalities and powers, yet it is causing scandal.  This author seems to have people who were a little over zealous and possibly fell back into, or were ensnared into, inappropriate worship of heavenly realities. Thus in this entire dynamic we have three kinds of people, first those who effectively use sacrificial systems that honor or convert the powers and draw worship to God.  Second, those who have “weak consciences and are scandalized by honoring the angelic powers.  Third, those who take cultic ritual that honors the angelic powers too far and falls back into worship of principalities and powers or are ineffective in their cosmic conversion and are ensnared and enslaved by them.

Given the position of the author it now makes sense why he mentions Christ's priesthood according to Melchizedek, yet immediately states states,

About this we have much to say, and it is difficult to explain, for you have become sluggish in hearing.  Although you should be teachers by this time, you need to have someone teach you again the basic elements of the utterances of God. You need milk, [and] not solid food.  Everyone who lives on milk lacks experience of the word of righteousness, for he is a child.  But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties are trained by practice to discern good and evil.

Given that it makes sense that the ultimate validation of such ritual is left to the magisterium of the Church.

In the next section we will begin to explore on a macrocosmic level by the expansion of rites through the process of autocephaly.  This process would use the rites and rituals  other cultures and nations in a way conformed to the paschal mystery yet appropriate to them.  This acculturation would be done to cult rite and ritual as salt is applied to food, not enough leaves it tasteless, too much leaves it unpalatable.  

We will start by noting how the Protestant Reformation and subsequent counter reformation effectively stymied the free adaptability of the church to respond to the best evangelical practices of the past toward the newly discovered peoples during the age of exploration.  Since then the progress of both cultural and cosmic evangelization has been halting at best.  Thus the section will discuss the need for the Greater Catholic Church to practice the cosmic evangelization necessary for a total adaptation of reality to Christianity.  This type of adaptation would be officially performed by the magisterium and produce new rites according to the ancient patterns of autocephaly. 

After that we will explore how these rites develop through guidance of the magisterium and practice of the laity, especially in the form of the domestic church.  And we will conclude with a case study concerning titles for Mary that are utilized for proper missionary activity.      

        

The Macrocosm of Cosmic Evangelization: Ecclesiology and Liturgy

Previously we laid out the methodology for evangelization of the cosmos.  We discussed the modern assumptions concerning how the Roman empire was evangelized.  We then sought to diminish the idea that this evangelization was a driving out of the old gods, or even a “bad turn to paganism and on to Roman Catholicism” as some of our Protestant brethren may believe.  Instead the missionization of the Gentiles by Paul and Peter seemed to be inclusive of their rites and a development and fulfillment of their rites and gods such that they lead to the Glorification of the one true God.  We then discussed the methodology of such action through calculated ritual and the difference between the animistic and dynamistic powers. We laid out three possible tactics of cosmic evangelization, fulfillment, conversion and replacement.  We concluded that section with an exploration of the problem that the author to the letter to the Hebrews experienced in terms of people taking that effort to far and the need for the Christian to keep an eye on the paschal mystery as the calibrating factor for effective sacrificial rites and proper cosmic evangelization. 

We now turn to how that evangelization must take place on the macrocosmic scale.  That is the development of liturgy for all the nations and cultures of the Gentiles.  God is patient regarding the fulfillment of his plan, and it seems that this process is in a quagmire at present, but if all peoples are to turn to God, the process of developing methodologies for them to do this such that they may approach the Father through Christ must continue.

Our Present Condition

There has been a slow crystallization of the Roman Faith easily traceable to the council of Trent and finding it’s culmination in Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis. I would never seek to devalue these important documents and pronouncements of the magisterium.  They are well crafted guides for maintaining orthodoxy amid inappropriate changes being applied much the same way the letter to the Hebrews is.  Alongside the legitimate concerns of the reformation, there grew the a refocusing on the dynamistic principalities, that is in modern terms, science, the polis and the economy.  In an much as Trent is a response to the excesses of Protestant liturgical reform, Pascendi is a response to the enthronement of new gods and a reordering of cosmology. 

However, the steadfastness of the Church as presented in magisterial teaching is taken by some as a frozen rigidity.  Misapplication of magisterial documents springing from this time frame lead to the belief among traditionally pious Roman Catholics that the Roman Rite, especially in its Latin form, is the only acceptable rite to God.  The belief is that this rite developed from seed to full fruition in the form of the Latin mass as codified in the counter reformation, and that this is how liturgy is done. 

It is easy to see how one could read this into what Trent says about the liturgy in Canon XIII,     

If any one saith, that the received and approved rites of the Catholic Church, won’t to be used in the solemn administration of the sacraments, may be contemned, or without sin be omitted at pleasure by the ministers, or be changed, by every pastor of the churches, into other new ones; let him be anathema.

This view of rigidity is usually anecdotally bolstered by examples of “Clown and Hotdog Masses” in the post Vatican II liturgical reforms, reforms rejected by some traditionalists.  Any development outside of “the liturgy” as envisioned by the counter reformation is seen as anathema and necessarily leading to a mockery of the holy mass.

But such rigidity is not necessitated by the quote from Trent.  The quote simply implies that there is a proper procedure according to the magisterium for implementing liturgical reform.  No one who is touched by the aesthetic would ever discount the beauty of the latin mass.  Additionally, the Novus Ordo has a specific beauty its own.  But these rites are not summations.  They are cultural instantiations of the summation and summit of calculated ritual for Christians, the eucharist.  Catholicism has never adhered to a uniformity of rites, nor even a uniformity of “Romanism”.  The Trentine quote does not speak of “approved Roman Catholic rites”, simply rites of the “Catholic [Universal] Church”.  

Theologically Trent and Pascendi seemed to be misapplied.  Pascendi is an attempt to grapple with the changing cosmology of the modern world where the powers have shifted from animistic to dynamistic and the focus is anthropocentric instead of cosmological.  Anthropocentrism and dynamicity are not unsuitable for Christianity, but when they are an end in and of themselves they lead to false worship of powers and of self.  The encyclical of Pius X seems to be mostly concerned with this problem, things are changing fast and we are unable to instill proper devotion and give a proper lens to the paradigm shift in real time.  Such anxiety is appropriate for temporally bound humans in a particular situation, but God is patient.  There is time to re-appropriate through the new evangelization and evangelization of the cosmos, and the cultural groundwork for this has been set at the Second Vatican Council.

We say “cultural groundwork” because the basic doctrines here have not changed.  Even in Trent it is obvious that there are multifaceted ways to approach liturgy and rites.  So, for example Canon 214 states,

The Christian faithful have the right to worship God according to the prescripts of their own rite approved by the legitimate pastors of the Church and to follow their own form of spiritual life so long as it is consonant with the doctrine of the Church.

Out of context the, the casual reader would place this quote squarely in the second Vatican Council, but it is evidence that there isn’t a change in thinking between the two councils, simply in focus.  The tumultuous times of cosmological reorientation and introduction of new gods has called for much experimentation in how to react.  the Church attempted a siege mentality, and it was successful in the short term.  But Pope Saint John XXIII reoriented the strategy for meeting the modern world.  That reorientation requires less of a siege mentality and more of a medical mentality.  We must quell the infection of the modern world with Catholicism.  Medicine must be adaptable to the illness.  Catholicism must be adaptable, though it remains Catholicism.  The Pope must learn to be more of a Chief Justice than a CEO and not lock down burgeoning spirituality such that the varied cultures of the universal church can, “follow their own form of spiritual life so long as it is consonant with the doctrine of the Church.”  This is permissible according to Trent and advised in the Lumen Gentium III:23,

           

By divine Providence it has come about that various churches, established in various places by the apostles and their successors, have in the course of time coalesced into several groups, organically united, which, preserving the unity of faith and the unique divine constitution of the universal Church, enjoy their own discipline, their own liturgical usage, and their own theological and spiritual heritage. Some of these churches, notably the ancient patriarchal churches, as parent-stocks of the Faith, so to speak, have begotten others as daughter churches, with which they are connected down to our own time by a close bond of charity in their sacramental life and in their mutual respect for their rights and duties.  This variety of local churches with one common aspiration is splendid evidence of the catholicity of the undivided Church. In like manner the Episcopal bodies of today are in a position to render a manifold and fruitful assistance, so that this collegiate feeling may be put into practical application.

    

This type of adaptability is necessary because the signs and symbols used, for example, in the liturgical year, are suited to divine revelation, but built upon this foundation into a cultic and ritual system based on the cultural symbology.

As an example, let's take a simple yet beautiful symbol, the advent wreath.  It makes complete sense in Northern Europe, as does the layout of the liturgical year.  The interplay of the light of the sun growing and shrinking, as sin darkens the world and the Son of God enters it makes for a beautiful sacralization of the entirety of reality.  

But what about the southern hemisphere?  Does it make sense to have a liturgical year where the light symbology of the heavens is reversed?  Should they craft theology to accommodate the light reversal or change the dates of celebrations?  What about Christianity on a space station where time is abstractly measured by calibrated motion or numerical change mechanisms?  Does it still make sense to have the liturgical year constructed exactly as is was conceived for the celestial occurrences as experienced in northern Europe?  Does the Tridentine Latin Mass make sense once one is missionizing in the way discussed in the treatise, Anthro-Expansivity and the Natural Next Step of The Great Commission

These are not a foolish questions.  The reason Christmas was put on the date that it was is to facilitate this beautiful symbology.  Because of electric lights and general spiritual indifference, we barely notice how impactful participation in this system should be.  Thus as Pope Benedict XVI says,  

Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred, we will not only deny the identity of Europe. We will also fail in providing a service to others to which they are entitled. 

This goes for every culture, we must observe the wisdom inherent in the culture and then as Christians be the salt of the Earth.  We must adapt a spirituality and liturgical life that brings out and actualizes the goodness of that culture, and eradicates its evils. 

What about Clown and Hotdog masses?  Well, what about them?  They were poor attempts with poor symbology.  They were also immediately halted by the appropriate magisterial authority.   Experimentation will yield mistakes and no one is advising over permissiveness.  In such a case there is the steady hand of the magisterium and the letter to the Hebrews to remind us of appropriate boundaries.  The ability to make mistakes to be corrected is necessary to yield a liturgical life that allows us to order our reality and evangelize the principalities and powers.  

Inculturation of liturgical life and regional piety is not simply a matter of linguistic translation, but symbolic translation as well as recognizing the principalities and powers that influence the culture.  Once recognized, it must be discerned as to whether or not those powers are having a positive effect on the culture so that the tactic of cosmic evangelization, fulfillment, conversion or replacement, can be chosen.  If the angelic principalities seek latria, they must be subjected to the will and order of Christ, not necessarily replaced.  Appropriate rites and pieties that invoke and employ the angels and saints that minister to each peoples and nation drawing them to God’s glory will only bring the Church into a greater universal standing. We must also be able to take those malicious powers and subjugate them to Christ through our ability to wield effective liturgy and piety, taking those powers and putting them under Christ's good kingship.  The demonic can only twist what is good, it cannot “create” some”thing” evil (ontologically).  Such cultural fulfillment and cosmological evangelization was the methodology of Paul and Peter and it should continue to be our methodology today.  As a last resort, there is the ability of humans to judges the powers beyond help and replace them with saintly celestial beings.    

  

The Macrocosmic Methodology: Autocephaly

What is needed in the Roman Church, under the guidance of the Pontiff, is a sense of autocephaly.  The process of autocephaly was recognized in the passage from Lumen Gentium quoted above,  

Some of these churches, notably the ancient patriarchal churches, as parent-stocks of the Faith, so to speak, have begotten others as daughter churches, with which they are connected down to our own time by a close bond of charity in their sacramental life and in their mutual respect for their rights and duties.  This variety of local churches with one common aspiration is splendid evidence of the catholicity of the undivided Church. In like manner the Episcopal bodies of today are in a position to render a manifold and fruitful assistance, so that this collegiate feeling may be put into practical application.

In the East this is a birthing process which renders near complete autonomy, but in the West we see the Pope as a “head among equals” of the episcopal body.  It may be that for effective development, the Roman church may need to be able to let go of some authority with regards to how the regional bishops exercise their power over liturgy and piety, such that each region can manifest the fullness of its relationship with God though it’s practice.

This was obviously the case in the ancient church.  The pillars, Peter, James and John, had some sort of oversight of the entirety of Christianity.  The other apostles went to various regions and began developing and fulfilling the culture according to the good purposes of Christ.  Paul went from Syria and sought to make his way all the way west to Spain.   Philip went to Samaria, then on to Ethiopia.  Thomas went to India.  Each these activities were watched and regulated by the Pillars, as is evidenced by Acts and Paul’s letters.

Each of these missions were successful in inculturating a Greco-Roman rite appropriate to the predominate culture of the time.  The overarching sacrificial structure of Greco-Roman paganism was fulfilled by calibration into eucharistic sacrifice.  Other pious structures were actualized and realized through a Christian lens into the fullest that they could be.  The catalyst for this transformation of culture came from the chosen people, who were chosen to be this exact kind of catalyst for the Gentiles.  Because of the coming of Christ they may now enter into appropriate relationship to God according to the noahide code and according to the custom of their “families.”

However, as the empire crumbled, communication between the west and the Church in India diminished and that Church stagnated.  For the most part it retained its basic Greco-Roman structure as a missionary church, and developed linearly from that. With the Islamic conquests in the 7th Century, the great churches of Africa and the near east were diminished.  The only place Christianity survived was where it did appropriately adapt and become the religion of the culture.  In those places, Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey etc. there is still a native Christian population that traces its lineage to the original missionary thrust of the Apostles and in sync with the ubiquitous Greco-Roman heritage of the time.  Where Christianity remained the religion and cult of the Greco-Roman oppressing class only it disappeared under the Islamic conquest.  It seems that Christianity only thrives where it is in communion with its apostolic tradition and where it serves as “the salt of the earth” giving the flavor to the local custom and tradition, fulfilling it and making it acceptable to the Father through Christ. 

After a millenia, Greco-Roman Christianity split into Greek and Roman Christianity, and was locked into Europe.  As was explored in the treatise Anthro-Expansivity and the Natural Next Step of The Great Commission There was a great surprise for Christianity with the coming of the age of exploration,

Lets re-cap, the Apostles thought they would only need to establish good governance in Israel, and the Gentiles would follow suit in according to the Noahide Code.  Then the Apostles found themselves traversing the empire in an anthro-expansive mission to bind all humanity into one spiritual family.  But the medieval world, deducing from the biblical table of nations, saw that world as one biological family, each continent descended from one of the sons of Noah.  They believed that if Islam would come over to Christianity, the job would be almost done.  So what is to be done when explorers hit a new continent with vast complex civilization, as advanced as their own, but that don’t fit into the table of nations? It turns out that when infinity bound by absolute finitude, exploded across the entire Roman empire, that empire was rather insignificant in terms of terrestrial population.   

Up to the age of exploration there was no need to have any other type of Christianity besides Greco-Roman.  All three major religious parties, Medieval Roman Catholics, Byzantine Christians and the Islamic Empires, saw themselves as the legacy of Rome.  Once the age of exploration expanded the world beyond that scope, some missionaries began to reinstitute the pauline practice of inculturation of Christianity, and synchronize the new populations with Christian orthodoxy in a way that used the cultural symbology, the latent cultural acceptance of the Spirit and angelic revelations inasmuch as it had accepted the Spirit and recognized the work of the one true God, and the existent cultural complex of calculated ritual. Some missionaries were more hesitant and sought to bring Christianity to the new peoples as the Roman rite and the Roman rite alone.  

This was a debate, until the debate was stymied as the Protestant Reformation gained serious traction.  At this point any appropriate evolution of liturgy and piety to suite local custom was lumped in with Protestant liturgical “reform” which went too far.  This in conjunction with the desacralization of the cosmos and the secular trajectory brought by the enlightenment, put the hard breaks on the effective missionary tactic of evangelizing the cosmos, of taking the old gods and assigning them as angels and demons, and then utilizing and evangelizing the people and their gods through effective recalibration of cosmology, and subsequent fulfillment of the cultural narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety.  Instead it became the religion of the oppressor, just as was the case in many of the Christian lands conquered by Islam.  The best attempt at cultural adaptation is translation of the liturgy into the local language from the Latin.  

This is not cosmic evangelization, it is disrespecting the work God has done in those people up to that point, and disrespecting what their covenant with God through the Noahide code should look like.  It is not treating those peoples as equivalent bricks in God’s living temple of the Church.  It is not respecting their function as members of the Body of Christ.  For example, in ancient times, India should have developed a Christianity which treated the good knowledge brought by, Vishu through Krisha for example, as angelic preparation for the message of Christ, but should have jettisoned the hindu cosmology which generally has a negative view of existence.  Liturgy that focused on the aesthetic of the Indus people should have been more prominently developed.  It should retain the nucleus of the sacral structure laid out in the treatise Sacramental Cosmology, but its major structure would follow a pattern closer to the sacrificial ritual manifest in that culture, adapted to the exodus passover and the sacral cosmology.  For example, how easy would it be to using the bathing of the shiva linga to missionize and developing appropriate rites from it.  As much as the linga is thought to presence shiva at it’s bathing, so a human becomes a temple of the holy spirit at baptism. Each involves a stalagmetrical structure bathed in water and by that bathing presences divinity.  An Indus Christian rite may recognize Shiva as a power that is not ultimate, but useful in his ability to remind us of flux and change, and the ultimate passing of this world.  In that baptismal rite, perhaps the linga could be in play, even though now the human is bathed.        

During the age of exploration, the general process of the Church in the missions was to enter an area and attempt to establish an apostolic prefecture headed by a priest.  If the mission develops and flourishes, the greater church would establish an apostolic vicariate headed by a titular bishop.  With continued growth the Roman church establishes a diocese.  It is our contention that during this growth the community should be catechized through introduction to Greco-Roman Christian cosmology, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety while the missionaries learn and absorb the cultural symbolism and religious expression.  As the structural process commences, there should be a slow shift in representation of the leaders from missionaries to local leadership.  During this time there should also be an effective calibration of, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety as well as an evangelion of their cosmic structure, such that their gods become the principalities and powers that are conquered by Christ and his church.  

After the diocese is established, and several diocese in a large region whose cultures are family resemblant are effectively missionized, their culture actualized and fulfilled, autocephaly should be considered.  Just as it takes three bishops, one of whom is the bishop of Rome if possible, to make a bishop, I would argue that three patriarchs, one of whom should be the patriarch of Rome, if at all possible, can create a patriarchate and a new rite through the act of autocephaly.   

This process would be the natural end of traditional evangelization just as it took place in Europe.  It is how it should take, or should have taken, place in the new world.  It is how it should take place if space exploration contacts intelligent life and all of the possibilities discussed in Anthro-Expansivity and the Natural Next Step of The Great Commission come to fruition.  I can only imagine that members of an extraterrestrial civilization would need serious catechesis, but at the same time there needs to be serious cosmological evangelization.  The way the Spirit and the angelic powers have prepared extraterrestrial nations would be as unique to them as how the Spirit and powers prepared the various peoples of Africa, the Americas, Asia,   Australia, and Europe for reception of the Gospel.  The benevolent principalities and powers that have aided these people should be accorded the honor they deserve for guiding the peoples thus far, just as a benevolent earthly king who instills an ethos of appropriate worship and is given sainthood.  Malevolent powers should be evangelized and brought to the good order of Christ their king, or replaced by a faithful celestial intercessor.

What is true extra-Greco-Roman cultures, including extraterrestrial cultures, is true of the modern post-enlightenment western secular culture, which has bowed down to dynamistic gods and effected the need for a new evangelization.  The gods of natural elements (mediated through science and technology), polis (mediates through political theory such as fascism and communism) and economy (mediated through the mathematical trade symbology of capitalism) can brought under the subjugation of Christ through effective calibration of, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety.  This process is the new evangelization, not simply making your neighbor read the catechism, but finding Christ dormant in the secular west and bring him to the forefront of the culture as salt brings flavors of foods to the front of the pallet.  Even here one could envision a new rite that is geared toward those who follow this cosmic system and inappropriately bow down to these gods, once appropriate evangelization has taken place.  

Under a cosmic evangelization geared toward dynamistic gods, these gods would be evangelized and would do their proper job of pointing to the glory God.  Again, one way this would need to be done is by assigning the dynamistic principalities celestial guardians in the form of saints who are invoked for their intercessory power.  This would place the dynamistic power under the auspices of a celestial personal agent, and ultimately under the power of the intercessory function of the Church, the Body of Christ and functionally under the power of Christ himself. 

For each possible rite, for each possible nation or family on earth and beyond, these preparations by the Holy spirit and the benevolent principalities and powers we are offered each of us a better chance to practice conscious ritual investment.  The more we are able to share our communities with each other the more we can share in the vision of God’s abundant love in creation.  Again as Benedict says  

Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred, we will not only deny the identity of Europe. We will also fail in providing a service to others to which they are entitled.         

And the same is true of each Gentile nation.  Again, Catholicism has never adhered to a uniformity of rites, nor even a uniformity of “Romanism”.   We have much to learn from ancient European, Greco-Roman Christianity, We also have much to learn from any Gentile nation’s manifestation of proper relationship to God as it is fully developed by proper cosmic evangelization.  With effective cosmic evangelization liturgy is not a linear development culminating in the latin tridentine mass.  Instead liturgy and rites are cultural manifestations of how sacral cosmology interfaces with the body of Christ, the pilgrim church on earth, as it presents Christ’s ultimate sacrifice in each “nation”.  Thus a reorganization of the temple of living stones around rites that calibrate pre-existent ritual systems of a Gentile nation seems to be the most traditional and most effective mode of evangelizing both peoples and their principalities and powers.  

In the first section of this treatise we focused on the principalities and powers as such.  After challenging our standard assumptions concerning the principalities and powers, we retraced the history of evangelizing the principalities and powers and supply a backdrop for that evangelization.  We reviewed Saints Paul and Peter’s tact when evangelizing the Gentiles along with how the author of the letter to the Hebrews sought to ground such evangelization by laying out the basic requirements of Christian inculturation. The first section continued through the development of the Greco-Roman rite of ancient Christianity.  Following that was an attempt to clarify of history by systematically discussing the implications and methodology for cosmic evangelization.

In the next section attempted to demonstrate how the Church can fulfill this critical aspect of its mission by means of the eastern concept of autocephaly.   We noted how the Protestant reformation and subsequent counter reformation effectively stymied the free adaptability of the Church to respond to the best evangelical practices of the past toward the newly discovered peoples during the age of exploration and discussed the need for the Greater Catholic Church to practice the cosmic evangelization necessary for a total adaptation of reality to Christianity.  

In the next section we will explore stability and mutability in cosmic evangelization. Stability will be the job of the clerical class, especially the magisterium.  Mutability is best practiced in the hand of the laity by both those involved in consecrated life and those members of various domestic churches.  We will explore how each of these types of lay person forms and adapts both culture and cosmos and shares in the evangelical mission of the universal Catholic church by means of a relationship between the sensus lacorium and the sensus fidelium.  

       

The Microcosm of Cosmic Evangelization: Sensus Laicorum and Sensus Fidelium

Previously we discussed the principalities and powers and retraced the history of evangelizing the principalities and powers through orienting and fulfilling the cosmology, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety of a culture and transforming their extraordinary religion into an ordinary form of expression.  In the next section attempted to demonstrate how the church can fulfill this critical aspect of its mission by means of liturgical development and the eastern concept of autocephaly.    

In this section we will explore stability and mutability in cosmic evangelization. Stability will be the job of the clerical class, especially the magisterium.  Mutability is best practiced in the hand of the laity by both those involved in consecrated life and those members of various domestic churches.  We will explore how each of these types of lay person forms and adapts both culture and cosmos and shares in the evangelical mission of the universal Catholic church by means of the sensus fidelium.   We will end this section and the body of the treatise by presenting a case study of how Mary has been an effective cosmic evangelizer throughout church history, but especially since the age of exploration.

Two Tier Development

Cosmic evangelization takes place through a calibration and fulfillment of a culture’s cosmology, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety.  This is principally expressed in various rites, which are a key evangelical tool for cosmic evangelization.  We have thus far discussed the most important sacrificial rite of Christianity, the eucharist, but we have only passingly mentioned the others.  Now it may be time to explore the various ways that cosmic evangelization can play out.  We will begin by exploring the various rites utilized by Catholicism, then the various arenas where they are defined and where they are malleable.

There are basically three types of Rites in the Catholic Church.  There are Sacraments, Hours, or the Divine office, and there are “Sacramentals”.  Each of these has a level of fluidity and each is exercised and defined by various parts of the Body of Christ.  

The seven sacraments of the Roman Church are the highest form of religious experience and expression for Christianity. They are the key conduits that channel the grace of God to the believer.  As we discussed in Sacramental Cosmology humans are constructed to receive grace through the physical world, and require calculated ritual in order to do this.  These specific seven rituals have been defined by Greco-Roman ancient Christianity to be the height of sacral ritual effectiveness.  What the sacraments are, how their ritual functions, who can administer them and who can receive them is defined specifically by the magisterium.  The magisterium is a slow, deliberative and macrocosmically adaptive authoritative organ of the body of Christ. Thus the sacraments are slow to change in any way beyond aesthetic.  Deep change is possible regarding the sacraments, but fundamental change is not because the sacramental life of the Church is fundamental to Christianity.  

The next rite is the hours, or the divine office.  This is a series of psalms and lessons which forms the regular prayer life of the Church outside of the regular sacramental expression.  The office forms a prayer of dialogue as opposed to sacramental expression.   At times the dialogue is between the Church or individual soul and God; at times it is a dialogue among the members of the Church; and at times it is even between the Church and the world.  And instead of being a utilization of the tangible, as the sacraments are, they are a sacralization of the absolutely intangible, they are a sacralization of time itself.  In the Catechism it states, 

The hymns and litanies of the Liturgy of the Hours integrate the prayer of the psalms into the age of the Church, expressing the symbolism of the time of day, the liturgical season, or the feast being celebrated. Moreover, the reading from the Word of God at each Hour (with the subsequent responses or troparia) and readings from the Fathers and spiritual masters at certain Hours, reveal more deeply the meaning of the mystery being celebrated, assist in understanding the psalms, and prepare for silent prayer.          

The official Liturgy of the Hours is promulgated and controlled by the magisterium and can be macro-adaptive.  Yet is is an inspiration of constant prayerful meditation that begets many cyclical and dialogical prayer structures.  Though the magisterium, as a deliberative and authoritative body, does adapt the hours slowly as the Church makes its pilgrimage through time.  However, dialogical prayer in each from is engaged in by every Christian when they pray to God, especially when they pray communally.  Orders and families make their own traditions of personal and regular prayer that utilize the same principle but adapted to their specific cultures and devotions.  These micro-adaptations prepare the participants for more perfect participation in the Liturgy of the Hours and develop spiritual rigor.

This interrelation between stable and general magisterial definition and creative and dynamic adaptation by the laity, both consecrated and in the domestic church, is even more geared toward the adaptive side when the third type of rite, sacramentals, is explored.  Sacramentals are objects or rituals that prepare on for reception of the seven sacraments proper.  Again, in the treatise Are Relics a Relic of the Past?  We discussed the nature of sacramentals, 

Classically sacramentals are defined as expressions of piety that extend the liturgical life of the Church, but do not replace it. They harmonize with the liturgical seasons, accord with the sacred liturgy, are in some way derived from it and lead the people to it.  What these physical things do indicate is that the entire cosmos is charged with God’s grace and this charge is encapsulated in the seven sacraments of the church.  Examples of sacramentals would be visits to sanctuaries, pilgrimages, processions, the stations of the cross, religious dances, the rosary, medals, and, of course, veneration of relics. [CCC 1675-1676] 

The magisterium most certainly has defined sacramentals, yet at the same time this is the most dynamic place where members of the laity can develop expressions and experiences of faith that suite the local culture.  Just as litanies to and invocations of the angelic powers can be developed concurrent with The Liturgy of the Hours, so sacramentals can be creatively utilized in a lay community through blessings and consecrations, the effect of which would be reliant on the cooperation of the lay person’s cooperation with their baptismal grace unless they obtained a priest to confer the blessing.  Once consecrated or blessed, an object can be used in rites developed by the domestic church or consecrated community as perfect examples of how, in the process of cosmic evangelization, one can use the “small s” sacramental life of the Church to great effect.  As these innovations are developed and calibrated, they may even reach a status of recognition by the magisterium as an approved sacramental for the universal church, giving then a measure of theological certitude.  In the International Theological Commission’s document Sensus Fidei they comment on this very process,

there is evidence that the laity played a major role in the coming into existence of various doctrinal definitions. Sometimes the people of God, and in particular the laity, intuitively felt in which direction the development of doctrine would go, even when theologians and bishops were divided on the issue. Sometimes there was a clear conspiratio pastorum et fidelium. Sometimes, when the Church came to a definition, the Ecclesia docens had clearly ‘consulted’ the faithful, and it pointed to the consensus fidelium as one of the arguments which legitimated the definition.

Again we see Christian power dynamics in play.  The job of the greater is to serve the least.  The job of the magisterium is to allow the laity, consecrated and domestic, to develop spiritualities for the purpose of personal edification, enculturation, and cosmic evangelization.  At the same time the magisterium keeps those rites and prayers within the bounds of orthodoxy.  Pope Benedict XVI makes note of this interrelationship of this when commenting on St. John Chrysostom,  

His pastoral plan was inserted into the life of the Church, in which laypeople, through baptism, take on the office of priest, king and prophet. “Baptism also makes you king, priest and prophet,” he told the faithful (see Homily on the Second Letter to the Corinthians, 3:5).

From this flows the Church’s fundamental task of mission, because each one, in some way, is responsible for the salvation of others: “This is the principle of our social life … to think not just about ourselves!” (see Homily on Genesis, 9:2). Everything takes place between two poles: the larger Church and the “little Church,” the family, in a mutual relationship.

The job of the laity is to be as creative with spirituality and cosmic evangelization as possible in order to maximally expand methodologies for glorifying and experiencing God.  Saint Francis de Sales explores this when he states,

I say that devotion must be practised in different ways by the nobleman and by the working man, by the servant and by the prince, by the widow, by the unmarried girl and by the married woman. But even this distinction is not sufficient; for the practice of devotion must be adapted to the strength, to the occupation and to the duties of each one in particular.

Through devotion your family cares become more peaceful, mutual love between husband and wife becomes more sincere, the service we owe to the prince becomes more faithful, and our work, no matter what it is, becomes more pleasant and agreeable.

It is therefore an error and even a heresy to wish to exclude the exercise of devotion from military divisions, from the artisans’ shops, from the courts of princes, from family households. I acknowledge, my dear Philothea, that the type of devotion which is purely contemplative, monastic and religious can certainly not be exercised in these sorts of stations and occupations, but besides this threefold type of devotion, there are many others fit for perfecting those who live in a secular state.

Therefore, in whatever situations we happen to be, we can and we must aspire to the life of perfection

The laity is divided into two different types, consecrated and domestic.  Regarding inculturation and cosmic evangelization, the difference between the two is the difference between regular troops and special forces in the military.  Those engaged in consecrated life wear uniforms, congregate in larger numbers, take direction more immediately from high command, they are more suited to occupation than guerrilla war,  but once in the field, need to be able to fight the battle.  Those who engage in the sacrament of marriage are more like special forces.  Our job is to fight the battle by blending in and adapting to our environment as we engage the local population in our struggle.

This metaphor speaks to a certain type of spirituality, but the point is, evangelization is a task that requires missions and has objectives.  The battle is to sacralize the world.  Christ has won sure victory, yet his body on earth is effecting that victory in advance of the Eschaton.  Slowly but surely as the pilgrim church on Earth progresses the mystical Body of Christ evangelize the angelic powers.  The role of the magisterium and the clerical class is to regulate and provide the sacraments.  The job of the laity is cultural innovation within the bounds set by the magisterium.  In the end one arrives at something like The Dungaw Rite, where what was fairly obviously some sort of pagan ritual is actualized and fulfilled though a replacement methodology and now serves the purpose of drawing the believer to Christ.

In the struggle the entire church is seeking to sacralize the entire created world.  Anything that cannot be brought back to or actualized in its fundamentally good nature is a failure in our task.  This way that this process works in its entirety is by means of the sensus fidelium (sense of the faithful), as it was described by Lumen Gentium,

The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole people's supernatural discernment in matters of faith when "from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful" they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God.

Yet our focus has been on the creative evangelical freedom of the sensus laicorum, the sense of the laity.  The focus is not controversial, but misleading because the sensus fidelium is often mistaken for some sort of authority invested in the laity.  The teaching authority of the Church has made it clear that appropriate use of the term considers the laity, the theologians and the magisterium.  The focus on the laity in Lumen Gentium empowers the laity, diminishing the misconception that the laity should be passive.  Most of the conversation concerning the sensus fidei revolves around the baptismal call to be a prophet.  A prophet’s job is to call the people of Israel back to God.  Our argument is that evangelization of the cosmos is the same process.  God has built into us the desire to find him.  Even as gentiles get sidetracked by lesser power structures, they need to be called back to their original calling to be one with God.  One of the best ways to do this is to evangelize the principalities and powers, such that theologically they are in a proper place and the faithful have a medium, through proper cosmology, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety to exercise their faith and attune themselves the their environment and their purpose.

One of the most obvious places that the relationship between the sensus fidelium as an tool of cosmic evangelization has played out is with marian devotion, this was the case in the early church and has become extremely prominent in modern times.  It will help toward the end of this treatise to take time to give a thumbnail of marian devotion as a tool of cosmic evangelization to see the abstract as an actual.

Mary Our Mother and Cosmic Evangelizer

      

There is a clear participation between the sensus laicorum and the sensus fidelium when it comes to marian devotion and even dogma.  Pope Benedict XVI stated in his General Audience, 7 July 2010.

Faith both in the Immaculate Conception and in the bodily Assumption of the Virgin was already present in the People of God, while theology had not yet found the key to interpreting it in the totality of the doctrine of the faith. The People of God therefore precede theologians and this is all thanks to that supernatural sensus fidei, namely, that capacity infused by the Holy Spirit that qualifies us to embrace the reality of the faith with humility of heart and mind. In this sense, the People of God is the 'teacher that goes first' and must then be more deeply examined and intellectually accepted by theology.

This mutual participation in the definition of dogma is born out of the Catholic understanding of lex orandi lex credendi.  When the Church as a whole prays and participates in rites and venerations eventually the rite and theology that develops can be defined by the magisterium according to the privilege of binding, what is bound on earth is bound in heaven.  Thus Mary mother of the Church has been placed in the prominent role of Queen of heaven by God at the petition of her people and in her compassion she accepts that role and all other roles requested.  Twice dogmas of the Church have been promulgated with the consultation of the sensus lacorium, in consensus with the theologians and through an ex cathedra statement by the pontiff.  The International Theological Commission’s document Sensus Fidei relates each time in brief,

In the apostolic constitution containing the definition, Ineffabilis Deus(1854), Pope Pius IX said that although he already knew the mind of the bishops on this matter, he had particularly asked the bishops to inform him of the piety and devotion of their faithful in this regard, and he concluded that ‘Holy Scripture, venerable Tradition, the constant mind of the Church [perpetuus Ecclesiae sensus], the remarkable agreement of Catholic bishops and the faithful [singularis catholicorum Antistitum ac fidelium conspiratio], and the memorable Acts and Constitutions of our predecessors’ all wonderfully illustrated and proclaimed the doctrine. . .

In 1946, following the pattern of his predecessor, Pope Pius XII sent an encyclical letter, Deiparae Virginis Mariae, to all the bishops of the world asking them to inform him ‘about the devotion of your clergy and people (taking into account their faith and piety) toward the Assumption of the most Blessed Virgin Mary’. He thus reaffirmed the practice of consulting the faithful in advance of making a dogmatic definition, and, in the apostolic constitution,Munificentissimus Deus (1950), he reported the ‘almost unanimous response’ he had received.[49]Belief in Mary’s Assumption was, indeed, ‘thoroughly rooted in the minds of the faithful’.

A dogma is the highest level of authority and the most stable of beliefs in the Catholic Church.  Yet there are a host of dynamic and adaptive ways to approach Mary for intercession that seek to allow her to be our aid in the  evangelization of the cosmos.  Again the Theological Commission states, 

As she awaits the return of her Lord, the Church and her members are constantly confronted with new circumstances, with the progress of knowledge and culture, and with the challenges of human history, and they have to read the signs of the times, ‘to interpret them in the light of the divine Word’, and to discern how they may enable revealed truth itself to be ‘more deeply penetrated, better understood and more deeply presented’.[85] In this process, the sensus fidei fidelium has an essential role to play. It is not only reactive but also proactive and interactive, as the Church and all of its members make their pilgrim way in history. The sensus fidei is therefore not only retrospective but also prospective, and, though less familiar, the prospective and proactive aspects of the sensus fidei are highly important. The sensus fidei gives an intuition as to the right way forward amid the uncertainties and ambiguities of history, and a capacity to listen discerningly to what human culture and the progress of the sciences are saying. It animates the life of faith and guides authentic Christian action. . . 

Reception’ may be described as a process by which, guided by the Spirit, the people of God recognises intuitions or insights and integrates them into the patterns and structures of its life and worship, accepting a new witness to the truth and corresponding forms of its expression, because it perceives them to be in accord with the apostolic Tradition. The process of reception is fundamental for the life and health of the Church as a pilgrim people journeying in history towards the fullness of God’s Kingdom

Regarding cosmic evangelization, with the dawn of the age of exploration, for the first time in more than a millennium, the Church was once again in a position to evangelize the principalities and powers, and there was once again a great need to break out of a cultural specific model of Christianity.  The first break was to calibrate Christianity such that Greco-Romans could worship according to their rite as well as Jews.  After this the spreading of the gospel and making disciples of all nations seemed to halt, both in geography and in terms of inculturation of the gospel.  Rite and ritual never spread past the influence of Greco-Roman civilization.  Even the Saint Thomas Christians in India never broke free from their Greco-Roman liturgical influence.  

When the age of exploration opened new parts of the ancient continents and an entire “new world” development began.  But as we noted before, the Protestant Reformation made development suspicious and effective cosmic evangelization was not fully embraced.  Yet a place where one can see effective cosmic evangelization is the utilization of the celestial status of Mary.  The type of cosmic evangelization here is replacement and personalization.  That is, the old mother goddesses, present across the human cultural spectrum, are replaced by the queen of heaven, Mary.  Also as the age of exploration becomes imbued with secularism and nationalism, one sees a trend of personalizing these dynamistic forces by placing them under the patronage of Mary.  We shall first discuss the tactic of replacement, then personalization.

Across human pagan systems there is the figure of the mother goddess.  Deep in human history our species related the female body with its life giving ability to the earth itself and its ability to sustain life.  The crops that spring from the ground and the milk that come from the body of the women are two ways of sustenance.  Birth from the female body is resonant of the initial creation out of the ground (Gen 2) or water (Gen 1).  As was discussed in the treatise Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence the Eucharist also speaks to these same appreciations which work deep in the human psyche.  Across humanity religious activity has expressed the archetype of the mother in the form of various goddesses.  As we noted, in Greco-Roman Christianity, the center of that cult was Ephesus, the very place where Mary was declared Theotokos, Mother of God.  This is cosmic evangelization by replacement.  As she was assumed into heaven, Mary takes on the role of the intercessor and presents herself as the culture needs to fulfill the maternal archetype in religious ritual.  Again, the old “gods”, who demand worship aimed at them, are jettisoned for a figure who is intercessory. Thus the passage in Jeremiah 7 does not condemn this particular kind of activity.  In the Occidental Mythology volume of his classic Masks of God series Joseph Campbell states, 

No good Catholic would kneel before an image of Isis if he knew it was she.  Yet every one of the mythic motifs now dogmatically attributed to Mary as a historic human being belongs also - and belongs in the period and place of the development of her cilt- to that goddess mother of all things       

Campbell goes on to relate the similarities between the cult of Isis and Osiris and the Christian Gospel.  He seems to use this as a deridation of Christianity, or somehow a disproof of it.  Yet as was discussed here and in other treatises such as Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment, for Christianity, and proto manifestation of the gospel is simply preparation for the culture to accept the truth when it is presented.  In this case the cult of Isis allowed for a replacement tactic of cosmic evangelization.  Once Mary is assumed into heaven she can appropriate the symbology of the mother Goddess and fulfill the archetypal need to pay respect to the special role of the Mother who mediates creation by giving birth just as the land mediates creation by its sustenance.  When I, as a Catholic, kneel before a it is not Isis who I am kneeling before but the queen of heaven who abides there and has replaced fulfilled the older understandings, and who is honored by hyper-dulia, not latria.

The Virgin Mary is the new creation, God having taken his Son from her body just as he took his first son, Adam (Lk 3:38), out of the Earth.  Once in heaven through her intercession, she serves a celestial function that attributes proper cosmology, narrative, and allows for the calibration of ancient ritual to appropriate Christian practice.  This ritual gives glory to God as opposed to “gods”.  So Campbells question is a just one,

Can Notre Dame de Chartres be the same as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe?  No Catholic would hesitate to kneel and pray before either image” Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death.”  Yet the usual anthropologist, arriving as it were from MArs, for who theories of diffusion are anathema and all crosscultural comparisons methodologically beneath contempt, would be in danger of returning to his planet of pure thought with two exquisitely separate monographs; the one treating the local French, the other the local Mexican goddess, functionally serving two entirely different social orders, Our Lady of Chartres, furthermore, showing the influence of a Gallo-Roman Venus Shrine, of which the evidence appears in the Black Madonna observed in the crypt of the present (twelfth to sixteenth century) Cathedral, whereas our Lady of Guadalupe is clearly of  Amerindian origin, having appeared in a vision (or so it is alleged by all native informants) hardly a decade after the overthrow of Montezuma, on the site of a native Shrine, probably the great serpent goddess Coatlicue.

One most certainly picks up a disdain for western appropriation of the ancient, and a sense of, therefore, inauthenticity of these traditions throughout Campbell’s series.  From the believer's point of view, these appropriations are the natural tactic of cosmic evangelization.  At the very least, Mary is able to “shapeshift” so to speak in order to fulfill those mythologies and actualize them by instilling them with true Christian cosmology.  “Pray for us sinner now” is a key phrase in the above quote and the cosmological shift between Mary and the amorphous “goddess” who spans human history.

It is a tactic of cosmic evangelization that Mary herself then becomes amorphous, “all things to all people” such that she can pray for them now and at the hour of their death.  Hence the phrase “Our Lady” is possessive.  Whatever form she may manifest is a form for the peoples that she is interceding for as she continues the work of cosmic evangelization in the heavens.  It is interesting that this phrase mostly comes into use during and after the age of exploration.  As the missionaries and the peoples take Mary unto themselves, they are able to activate their preexistent cultic action by banishing conceived goddess concepts and recalibrating their cosmology.  When they pray with Mary as informed by their culture, she is “their” lady.  The missionaries themselves were very adept at using cosmic evangelization.

As the age of exploration turned to the modern period and nationalism became a secular agenda, various “our lady”s took the trappings of nation states in order to bring those people out of the power of those dynamistic forces and into the personal relationship with Mary that can bring them toward God.  A good example of this is Mary Queen of Vietnam or Our lady of Fatima’s special relationship with portugal and against godless secularism.  Again, this type of cosmic evangelization is geared toward the dynamistic power of the polis.  Since that power is impersonal, and Christianity is a religion of personal relationships, it makes sense for the Church to develop a relationship to the power by proclaiming Mary’s queenship over that power on earth through intercessory prayer and binding her in that role in heaven out of her compassion.

This ability to evangelize the cosmos and not simply the person’s intellect and behavior or the “rules” of the society.  If that is all that is happening, the evangelization is only a secular affair, speaking to secular situations.  It is not ineffective, but neither is it “catholic” or in anyway holistic.

Much like the Seven African Powers, marian devotion can go awry.  The same test is applied to Mary as would be applied to any other celestial being, is glory being accorded ultimately to God or is the being drawing glory to himself?  For example, with two recent marian devotions, very careful theology is needed to make sense of them to the point of their being offensive to pious ears.  The first is “Our Lady of All Nations”.  The congregation for the Doctrine of the faith has already had to alter the prayer demanded of the vision, changing the line, “who was once Mary” to “the Blessed Virgin Mary” to prevent pastoral misunderstanding.  When having her visions Ida Peerdeman claims the lady asked for a fifth marian dogma to be proclaimed, that of co-redemptionist or co-mediatrix.  There are proper ways of understanding this a “hyper-dulia” the special honor given to Mary, but the demand is interesting.  

Also the second secret of Fatima makes similar seeming self glorifying demands,

I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.  

Again, there are appropriate ways to make sense of this, but it is suspicious that the entire scope of the first two secrets, the only two told by the visionary witnesses themselves, make no mention of Christ or God the Father, except that God is offended by war, and God desires devotion to Mary’s heart, a seeming reversal of the appropriate dulia/latria relationship.  Thus, if something good (a marian apparition for example) can be twisted to something evil by the demonic, the faithful may begin to misunderstand these visions en masse and Pope Benedict XVI’s reflection on Fatima and the nature of private revelation may need to be revisited

The authority of private revelations is essentially different from that of the definitive public Revelation. The latter demands faith; in it in fact God himself speaks to us through human words and the mediation of the living community of the Church. Faith in God and in his word is different from any other human faith, trust or opinion. The certainty that it is God who is speaking gives me the assurance that I am in touch with truth itself. It gives me a certitude which is beyond verification by any human way of knowing. It is the certitude upon which I build my life and to which I entrust myself in dying.    Private revelation is a help to this faith, and shows its credibility precisely by leading me back to the definitive public Revelation. In this regard, Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, says in his classic treatise, which later became normative for beatifications and canonizations: “An assent of Catholic faith is not due to revelations approved in this way; it is not even possible. These revelations seek rather an assent of human faith in keeping with the requirements of prudence, which puts them before us as probable and credible to piety”. The Flemish theologian E. Dhanis, an eminent scholar in this field, states succinctly that ecclesiastical approval of a private revelation has three elements: the message contains nothing contrary to faith or morals; it is lawful to make it public; and the faithful are authorized to accept it with prudence (E. Dhanis,Sguardo su Fatima e bilancio di una discussione, in La Civiltà Cattolica 104 [1953], II, 392-406, in particular 397). Such a message can be a genuine help in understanding the Gospel and living it better at a particular moment in time; therefore it should not be disregarded. It is a help which is offered, but which one is not obliged to use.

Records of these visions can and maybe should sometimes fade away if there becomes a mixing of dulia, or even hyper-dulia and latria.  

But as was often discussed in the treatise on Somnium Spirituality, visions are useful and valid forms of religious understanding.  In terms of the laity’s job in all this, we are the dynamic actors who must inculturate Christianity.  Many useful and beautiful titles of Mary spring from visions in the waking world.  These visions are often granted to laity, either consecrated or domestic.  During some of these visionary experiences a physical object was left on the terrestrial plan.  Examples of this would be the first marian apparition of “Our Lady of the Pillar” in Spain, Our lady of Guadalupe in mexico and Our Lady of Good council in Italy.  But far more often than not, it is the lay artist who channels the maternal archetype in artistic form to draw veneration and hyperdulia toward the queen of heaven.  This is important work for calculated ritual.  As Saint Thomas Aquinas says in the Summa 3:25:3

  

As the Philosopher says (De Memor. et Remin. i), there is a twofold movement of the mind towards an image: one indeed towards the image itself as a certain thing; another, towards the image in so far as it is the image of something else. And between these movements there is this difference; that the former, by which one is moved towards an image as a certain thing, is different from the movement towards the thing: whereas the latter movement, which is towards the image as an image, is one and the same as that which is towards the thing. Thus therefore we must say that no reverence is shown to Christ's image, as a thing---for instance, carved or painted wood: because reverence is not due save to a rational creature. It follow therefore that reverence should be shown to it, in so far only as it is an image. Consequently the same reverence should be shown to Christ's image as to Christ Himself. Since, therefore, Christ is adored with the adoration of "latria," it follows that His image should be adored with the adoration of "latria."              

The latria accorded an image of Christ can translate to the dulia accorded a image of a saint and the hyperdulia accorded Mary. The effect of a well crafted piece of art is so impactful that there are feast days of marian devotions which started as statues and painting and expanded to full fledge celebrations of the queen of heaven in their own rite.

The job of the artist as they wield their craft is to bring those who experience their art back to God.  Indeed any creative endeavor is successful inasmuch as it is creation with God to bring people back to God, just as the Virgin Mary created with God his incarnate Son in order to bring all people back to God.  A well crafted ceremony, poem song, piece of visual art, ect.  All of these can do wonders for one’s fellow humans, and the visual arts are a medium for calculated ritual that fosters cosmic evangelization.

Hence one of my favorite statues in our church is after a certain style that I have noticed.  The statue is of Anthony of Padua.  The style of the statue is such that when one stands at a distance the eyes are shut, yet as one approaches the eyes open.  It is reminiscent of hindu idols.  According to their belief, when they eyes are painted on the idol is made active.  This is true of the Moai statues on Easter Island, whose faces have sockets made for insertion of eyes made of coral.  Knowing this, I garnered a sense of conscious ritual investment as I approach the statue and as the eyes open, at that moment I get a sense that Saint Anthony is available to pray with me.

  

The artist's ability to channel the archetypes and the basic devotional data toward a deeper relationship with the celestial beings as they draw us to God is of primary importance for cosmic evangelization.  They must be able to either successful shift the image of the angelic power such that their symbology is one of intercession and aiding in the quest for God or successfully replace the rebellious power with a celestial being (saintly or angelic) who can channel the same symbology for the people and help them.

Once the people are able to truly enter into prayer relationships with the celestial saints and powers, those beings’ ability to utilize effective prayer comes into service and prayers to God are answered.  Indeed the  ‘two or three gathered in my name” need not be terrestrial or even human.  Examples of this exact situation can be seen with devotion to Mary under the titles of Our Lady of Prompt Succor and Our Lady of Bonaria.  

The artist has a special task when seeking to inspire latria when making a visual representation of Christ.  As Aquinas noted, it is proper to utilize art in such a way and the effect is productive prayer, in which Christ answers from the Right Hand of the Father.  Examples of images of Christ where this would be the case Holy Infant of Good Health and Santo Niño de Cebú.  Each of these four statues has its own feast day in the Church.

When looking into the devotions of Mary under various titles and manifistations the diversity, as Campbell notes, is striking.  In an organization as “top down” as the Catholic Church is perceived to be one would assume that there would be a complicated bureaucratic process for developing a new title and devotion.  But equally as striking is the absence of oversight concerning these titles and aesthetic flourishes.  It seems with Mary, the tact of cosmic evangelization through replacement is almost completely in the hands of the laity, consecrated and domestic.  This is the sensus fidelium at it’s best, so much so that our best examples of the sensus fidelium in full effect was the ex cathedra statements concerning two marian dogmas.

Declaration of dogma is rare in the Catholic church, rare too, but more likely, is the canonical crowning of a statue.  This is when the  Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments decides that a devotion revolving a visual representation of Jesus, Mary or Joseph merits some kind of magisterial recognition.  At that point a bull is issued (the requisite paperwork) and a papal legate or nuncio canonically crowns the statue as an official recognition of the devotion by the Church. 

Other than this ritual there seems to be no set guidelines for titles and/or artistic representations of Mary in the Church.  It is curious that there seems to be so much freedom here and so little liturgically.  It seems that the idea of subsidiarity is actually in play regarding images and devotions concerning Mary, but not, say, the liturgy, which is strictly regulated in every conceivable detail form the highest levels.  Why would this be?

Again, around the time of renewed ability for cosmic evangelization, the protestant

reformation was jettisoning any sense devotion to Mary and the saints, but it did adapt the worship service in radical ways, which lead to a focus in the counter reformation on, among other things, the “proper way” to perform liturgy.  Or at least the defining the improper way, as specific anathemas are more open ended than specific proclamations.

Since there were no problems with Protestants “hijacking” mariology it remained a place of free commerce between the laity and the magisterium. Mary and the saints also remained an effective tools of cosmic evangelization, especially recently in taming the dynamistic powers of the elements, the polis and the economy under the personal agency and intercessory power of a celestial being.  It may now be time, as the ecumenical movement continues to coalesce, to develop trust for the sensus fidelium in toto and loosen the reigns on rite and ritual in subsidiary manner such that it too can be a tool for cosmic evangelization, just as it was for Peter and Paul.   

Conclusion

    

To conclude, this treatise has sought to go beyond both personal and social evangelization and strive toward cosmic evangelization.  In the first section of this treatise we focused on the principalities and powers as such.  After challenging our standard assumptions concerning the principalities and powers, we retraced the history of evangelizing the principalities and powers and supplied a backdrop for that evangelization. We reviewed Saints Paul and Peter’s tact when evangelizing the Gentiles along with how the author of the letter to the Hebrews sought to ground such evangelization by laying out the basic requirements of Christian inculturation.  In the next section we sought to demonstrate how the Church can fulfill this critical aspect of its mission by means of the eastern concept of autocephaly.   The section will discuss the need for the Greater Catholic Church to practice the cosmic evangelization necessary for a total adaptation of reality to Christianity and through adaptation and fulfillment of cosmology, narrative, morality, theology, ritual and piety transform extraordinary forms or religion to ordinary forms.  This can take place by acknowledgment, conversion or replacement of the angelic powers.  In the final section we covered the job of the laity in the form of the domestic church and those engaged in consecrate life as the laity forms and adapts both culture and cosmos and shares in the evangelical mission of the universal Catholic church by means of the sensus fidelium. And engaged in a case study concerning the development of marian titles in the last four centuries, Through this case study we attempted to unlock the potential of what cosmic evangelization can allow for and how it can help humanity as well as the church.  

To some this may seem a dangerous endeavor.  Weren't we warned to avoid the demons of paganism?  First we must recognize that the benevolent angelic powers and the Holy Spirit were at work preparing the pagans for the reception of Christ.  It is appropriate to honor the benevolent angels with dulia and ritual that honors God and recognizes their achievement as well as work as the body of Christ on earth to fulfill and complete what they began.

   Inasmuch as the pagan gods are demons, we should be wary, only in that they are tricky.  We should love our enemies as much in the celestial world as the terrestrial.  We must use cosmic evangelization to bind them as Christ’s conquered subjects and allow them a chance to bring glory to God as well by conversion.  If they refuse then the cosmos are evangelized by replacement as opposed to subjugation.  As Paul said, we will judge the angels.

But what if we are tricked by the demonic?  God will not leave his faithful unaided, especially if we are of good intention. At this point it may be helpful to call attention to the fascinating character, Blessed Giles of Santarem.  This proto-faustian proto-saint sold his soul to the devil in a blood pact to gain scientific and magical knowledge.  After a time a he and a vision of a fully armored knight who convinced him to convert.  Upon his penance the devil laid at the pact feet of the Virgin releasing him from damnation.  

This story is fascinating because the devil is clearly the temptor, yet has a part to play in Giles’ true penance.  In the general myth, the tempter is a rebellious fallen angel.  There seem to be such fallen malevolent celestial beings in the latter part of the Bible.  But rarely are they mentioned.  It is possible to see the devil from the “spirit of prophecy” given to Zedekiah son of Kenaana, through the adversary who tested Job, to the tempter who approached Jesus in the desert as just spirits who are doing their job.  They are testing humanity and keeping their will to love strong.

  It is also fascinating because it remind us just how true it is that God forgive all if one is truly repentant.  Paul asserts that we are free, free from legalism that keeps liturgy lock in place, free from the principalities and powers, such that we owe them nothing and can even seek to convert them, free to love even if we make mistakes along the way.     

This love should drive us to be better people, and work for a better society here on Earth.  But if this is all we work for we are no better than secular humanists with a transcendent fixation.  If we engage in cosmic evangelization, we aid in the conversion, not just of our fellow humans, but of the entire cosmos.  Christ is responsible for our personal and social glorification in the kingdom of God, yet we work hard on our end to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect.  Christ has also conquered all the principalities and powers, but we have a responsibility to calibrate our relationship with them and bind them in heaven by binding them on Earth through calibrated calculated ritual.