It is only here, in this purified and restored vision, that we might begin to understand why the ineffable mystery of the relationship between God and His creation, between God and His chosen people, between God and His Church is “essentially” revealed to us as a nuptial mystery, as the fulfillment of a mystical marriage; why, in other terms, creation itself, the Church herself, man and the world themselves, when contemplated in their ultimate truth and destiny, are revealed to us as a Bride, as a Woman clothed in the sun; why in the very depth of her love and knowledge, of her joy and communion, the Church identifies herself with one Woman whom she exalts as “more honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.”
Is it this mystery that has to be “understood” by means of our broken and fallen world, which knows and experiences itself only in its brokenness and fragmentation, in its tensions and dichotomies, and which as such is incapable of the ultimate vision? Or is it this vision and this unique experience that must again become for us the “means” of our understanding of the world, the starting point and the very possibility of a truly divine victory over all that in this world is but human, historical, and cultural?
