Folia Theologica 20. (2009)
Barbour Hugh: The Cosmology of Catholic Worship: Pre-Socratic Sacraments? A Consideration by a disciple of St. Thomas Qauinas
24 BARBOUR, Hugh So deep is his conviction that the ancient cosmology is outmoded that he actually achieves a kind of return to material nature, but as the most materialistic of Cyreniac Epicureans, reducing the "sign value" of the Christian sacraments to the opus manuum hominum and further to the forces of mute, but anthropomorphized nature. The resolution of the question of the nature of the sacraments driven by "pastoral considerations" is a dangerous, even if intentionally orthodox and distant variation on this Feuerbachian theme of evaluating the efficacy of the sacraments by the limits of present human experience, rather than the universal principles of the cosmos created and recreated in Christ. We must tread lightly indeed when we are tempted to ignore the universal testimony of the Fathers and Doctors that infants who die without baptism have no known way of supernatural beatitude open to them, or that the Eucharist can be confected without a form, in order to satisfy the sense of the scandalum pusillorum of numerous abortions and in vitro fertilizations in the former case, and political and social instability brought about by the American invasion of Iraq in the latter. A God who permits these evils is after all a greater problem for human understanding than a God who provides means of salvation which operate on analogy with the creation He has made. And these two Gods are one and the same God. The use of practical considerations in resolving speculative questions in theology has a sad history. Witness the Molinist doctrine of grace and free will, elaborated to avoid the clarity of Augustine and Thomas who sounded too close to Calvin for the purposes of preaching, which only lead to the aggravated Jansenist reaction, and so to the original case of modern habitual dissent from the Magisterium from which the Church has yet to recover, on the left or the right. In these questions what might be best since we live in an age so poor in vigorous theological speculation and rich in positive theology is to profess the docta ignorantia of Cusa, and cling to the ancient paths. This being said I do have some suggestions to offer in each of the cases presented in the objections. In the case of the salvation of infants who die without being baptized several points have been ignored. First, they are configured to Christ in that they will share in the general resurrection. Could it be said that their beatitude is deferred until they have overcome the obstacle of bodily death, at which point they could be granted supernatural life by their social life with Christ and the elect? St. Thomas says in the commentary on the Sentences that the
