Sensing the Sacred

This book offers a theological vision of learning informed by the mystagogical homilies of Ambrose of Milan, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. In dialogue with these four mystagogues, Hanna Lucas walks through the rites and liturgy surrounding baptism and the eucharist in order to establish a theological epistemology that sees knowledge as part of the "capacitation" of our nature for heavenly mysteries and union with God. The sacraments of initiation teach us that even the mundane aspects of knowledge, including the rudiments of matter and sensation, fit into a larger divine gift of capacitation. This book offers a holistic and integrated theory of knowledge that envisions one all-encompassing divine pedagogy that orients toward union with God. This union is experienced fully in the eschaton, but it breaks into time through the sacraments of the church, and it echoes down through the ordinary modes of knowing we encounter in daily life. Mundane knowledge beckons the knower to become capable of a sublime intelligence: to become capable of union with the divine. This integrative, unitive, and eschatologically oriented vision of knowledge stands in stark contrast to modern and postmodern epistemologies. Sensing the Sacred positions mystagogy as a timely remedy for the "incapacitations" that modernity offers us.