Mysterium Magnum

When I recently discovered Hugo Rahner’s great work about the Symbols of the Church (with which I once spent much time) in a secondhand bookshop, I rejoiced as if I’d met an old friend. I spontaneously felt like taking the book out to lunch.

Published in 1964, full of hope for the realisation in the present of ancient plenitude, it is a book to re-read now. Its very first sentence is apposite:

‘Since Paul in Ephesians 5:32 wrote the inspired word about the mysterium magnum which obtains between Christ and the Church, we can ever again, in the course of the history of dogma, deduce the Christian integrity and intellectual profundity of a theological system from the way in which, within the construction of the whole, the chapter on the Church is integrated.’

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