Temple and Contemplation brings together for the first ... - ImagoMundi

THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
rule. It is evident that whoever refused to enter the earthly assembly was
thereby excluding himself from the celestial assembly." 160
vi. The Imago Templi and Templar Knighthood
i. Questions raised by the "jam et nondum". We have just emphasized that
"eschatology realized in the present is experienced spiritually as a fact, as
the simultaneity of the jam and the nondum. This simultaneity is constituted
by and lived in the mysterium liturgicum, and postulates a liturgical time sui
generis which is not the time of History. Liturgical time wrests eschatology
away from the idea itself of historic-chronological time, of which eschatology,
according to current opinion, is simply the final end, to be expected in
an unforeseeable future. Recent researches have demonstrated what there
is in common as regards this experience between the Essene Community
of Qumran and the primitive Johannine community, that which produced
the Johannine corpus (see below, § 4). We must limit ourselves here to this
latter theme. The questions raised would assume their full amplitude if we
could refer in detail to the theology of the primitive Judaeo-Christian
community of Jerusalem, the Church of James, of which the Ebionite
community is the extension. We shall be able to allude to it only in
passing; but the inquiry must in any case confront themes of formidable
complexity, and it is most important to specify the terms in which these
themes are being formulated: historical or phenomenological. We must
confine ourselves here to the perspective within which we can hope to
understand the recurrence of the hierophanies of the Imago Templi.
The phenomenological relationships and affinities discernible, with regard
to Temple symbolism, between the Qumran Community and the
Johannine community, raise questions such as the following:
1. What is essentially common to the idea of the new Temple at
Qumran and the same idea in the Johannine community, and what is the
essential difference between them? What essentially creates this difference?
2. What does this difference tell us about the experience of time and
history? Has hierohistory been brought to a close? In what way does the
transition from eschatological Christianity to the Christianity of History
influence the recurrence or the cessation of the hierophanies of the Imago
160 Ibid., p. 198.
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THE IMAGO TEMPLI IN CONFRONTATION
Templi? If resurrection and eschatology are conceived and lived as located
in the mysterium liturgicum, is it not clear that current conceptions of
eschatology are inadequate?
3. On the other hand, is it not by grasping the common element in the
eschatological experience of the Qumran and Johannine communities that
the purposes and aims of all the paracletic movements which have arisen in
the course of the history of Christianity can be explained? And cannot the
birth of the concept of the Ecclesia johannis as the third reign and Church of
the Spirit be explained in the same way? Is there not an essential connection
between a mystery of Pentecost both already come to pass and not yet
come to pass, jam and nondum?
4. Is it not with reference to the purpose common to the paracletic idea
and to the recurrences of the Imago Templi that a response will be given to
the twofold lament heard in the beginning, the lament sounded in the
Talmud and the lament which, echoing in a solitary Pyrenean amphitheatre,
links the fate of the Temple with the fate of the Templar knighthood?
Here, in particular, the inquiry becomes the concern of phenomenology.
2. The theology of the Temple and the theology of the Church. The primitive
Christian community considered itself as the inheritor of the divine promises,
as the ideal Israel confronting the Israel of history. The discovery of
the literature of Qumran has had the result—still unforeseeable thirty
years ago—of setting us in the presence of the lofty spirituality of a Jewish
community which had a great deal in common with the milieu from which
the primitive Christian community emerged. Each has its founder (for
Qumran this was the "Teacher of Righteousness"), whose interpretation
of the Scriptures is decisive for his community. Both communities have
the same sense of eschatology. Both claim to be the true Israel. An
important function is fulfilled in the thought of both communities by the
same theme, that of the symbolism developed around the Temple. At
Qumran and in the New Testament, this Temple symbolism involves
three factors: a critique of the Temple of Jerusalem and of its sacrifices;
the belief that the last days have begun; and the conviction of both
communities that God dwells within it as he once dwelt within the
Temple. Both have the sense of being the community-temple. 161
161 B. Gartner, The Temple, op. cit., pp. IX-X, 100.
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