“And at the very moment when light was visibly and corporeally
separated from darkness, the good angels were invisibly set apart from
the wicked angels who were falling in the darkness of sin. The good
were illumined and converted to the light of righteousness, that they
might be light and not darkness. Thus we ought to perceive a
consonance in the works of God, the visible work conforming to the
issue of the invisible in such wise that the Wisdom which worked in
both may in the former instruct by an example and in the latter
execute judgment.”
The severance of light from darkness is the material example of how God
executes judgment in dividing the good from the evil. In this visible work
of God a “sacrament” is discernible, since every soul, so long as it is in
sin, is in darkness and confusion. All the visible works of God offer
spiritual lessons (_spiritualia praeferunt documenta_). They have
sacramental qualities, and yet are not perfected and completed sacraments,
as will hereafter appear from Hugo’s definition.
Following the order of creation, Hugo now speaks of the firmament which
God set in the midst of the waters to divide them:
“He who believes that this was made for his sake will not look for the
reason of it outside of himself. For it all was made in the image of
the world within him; the earth which is below, is the sensual nature
of man, and the heaven above is the purity of his intelligence
quickening to immortal life.”
The rational and unseen are a world as well as the material and visible.
The sacramental quality of the material world lies in its correspondence
to the unseen world. When Hugo speaks of the “sacramenta” in the creation
of light and the waters divided by the firmament, he means that in
addition to their material nature as light and water, they are essentially
symbols. Their symbolism is as veritably part of their nature as the
symbolical character of the Eucharist is part of the nature of the
consecrated bread and wine. The sacraments are among the deepest verities
of the Christian Faith. And the same representative verity that exists in
them, exists, in less perfected mode, throughout God’s entire creation. So
the argument carries out the principles of the sacraments and the
principles of symbolism to a full explanation of the world; and Hugo’s
work upon the Sacraments presents his theory of the universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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