Liturgical Practice as a School of Cognition. Community as a Condition for Becoming Oneself in the Image of God

Abstract

The present article explores the insights of a “trinitarian anthropology of technology”, focusing on the role of communities as spaces for introducing practices of self-formation. Drawing on ecological psychology in the tradition of James Gibson, the relevance of cultivated practice is examined through the concept of affordances. The perceptibility of affordances depends on sociocultural practice and prefigures human perception of the world and human actions. A specific perception of the world thus requires an initiation into certain practices, which is why communally transmitted liturgical practices play a transformative role in the self-formation of the human being in the image of God. Within the sphere of liturgical action, one learns to perceive the self, the other, and the world in their sacramentality. Simultaneously, liturgical practice fosters a medio-passive attitude, offering an alternative to the hegemonic anthropologies of the present.