ABSTRACT

The paradoxical movement which St Augustine explores in his spiritual theology about the greatest moments of transcendence as being simultaneously the deepest experiences of intimacy is the theme I trace in this chapter, a theme liturgy has the task of encouraging. I also wish to contrast his understanding of creation’s participation in divine beauty with Denys’s notion of emanation and suggest that the latter is a better theological foundation on which to build the liturgy of the future. For St Augustine and later contemplative writers, the source of our own identity, of who we really are and who we might become, is inseparable from the experience of both transcendent and interior beauty. He grows to love this God of Beauty, even if this was for him a late recognition in his life: ‘Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you’ he writes (1977: 10.231).