ABSTRACT
The sixth chapter of this monograph is dedicated to highlighting Hugh’s understanding of sacramental signification as being based on the graceful healing of humanity brought by Christ’s Incarnation. Indeed, through such Christocentric affirmation of the salvific work of God in time and space, Hugh points to the Incarnation as the restoration of human interpretation of – and active engagement with – signs in a fallen-yet-redeemed manner. The mystically semiotic cosmos is in Christ the sacramental vessel with which and through which the human being engages in signification to see God and to live – the consummation of the epistemic quest – and which alone allows the divine indwelling, a loving relation of nuptial union between God and the human. Additionally, this points to the fact that Hugh’s understanding of sacramentality is not a ‘zone’ within a theological discourse, but itself the entire theological framework as a whole – that is, an understanding of sacramentality which is mystically cosmic, historical, realist, and Christocentric. Ultimately, Hugh’s position assumes an intrinsic, cooperative union between semiotic signification, ontology, and epistemology, rather than an incompatible opposition between these three.
As this divine, Christocentric healing is made present in the divine praise, it is in the unfolding of the liturgical worship of the Church that humanity truly engages in an ontological and realist interaction with the analogical sacramental signs. Indeed, in the liturgical praise, re-enabled to participate in semiotic interpretation (semeiology), we are called to active semiotic engagement with sacramental signification (semeiopoiesis), and therefore, in Christ we are included in the authentic act of creation through semiotics (ontopoiesis).
