Folia Theologica 20. (2009)
Barbour Hugh: The Cosmology of Catholic Worship: Pre-Socratic Sacraments? A Consideration by a disciple of St. Thomas Qauinas
14 BARBOUR, Hugh us calor per se existens, oporteret ipsum esse causam omnium calidorum, quae per modum participationis calorem habent. Est autem ponere aliquod ens quod est ipsum suum esse: quod ex hoc probatur, quia oportet esse aliquod primum ens quod sit actus purus, in quo nulla sit compositio. Unde oportet quod ab uno illo ente omnia alia sint, quaecumque non sunt suum esse, sed habent esse per modum participationis. The immediate consequence of this meditation is that all kinds of causality in nature which are not that of creation involve of necessity some composition, God alone being the purely and simply incomposite cause of all. Thus St. Thomas gives to the Pre-Socratics their due, but attributes to the metaphysical discovery by Plato and Aristotle of the Separated Substance God, the understanding of the substance, that is the very being of created natural things, which, being created, are themselves necessarily composed of matter and form in accordance with their nature. Note that the Pre-Socratic account of nature may be true as far as it goes, but note as well that it limits the rationale for sensible things to their phenomenal, accidental nature, sensible on the surface, and leaves their substantial nature as a generic thing, a monistic one, material and universal, operating in a perpetual and determined progressive cycle of movement and change. The great breakthrough of the Platonic and Aristotelian synthesis is that the causes and the order which exists among them is understood, and so reality can be understood. The universal and the particular are no longer opposed through the paradox of movement and change, but are rather understood in the light of the order of univocal and equivocal causes, of the separated causes which contain virtually and simply what is unfolded in a multiplicity of composite effects which are themselves causes in their own orders. The reductionism of systems which resolve everything into a single element, or force, or number, or process of a univocal nature is overcome by the analogy of participation in being which links in human understanding the order of metaphysical realities which cause and sustain the being of composite, mobile things. There are multiple substances, with natures and definitions reflective of their own species, multiplied in individuals, which have been brought into being by One who, along with the pure spirits who move the world by desire for Him, and govern and dispose it in relation to Him. The sacramental signs instituted by Christ do not escape this world, nor does the moral order, or the expounding of dogmatic mysteries. In fact to deny the causal analogies adopted by traditional sacramental
