Folia Theologica 20. (2009)
Barbour Hugh: The Cosmology of Catholic Worship: Pre-Socratic Sacraments? A Consideration by a disciple of St. Thomas Qauinas
THE COSMOLOGY OF CATHOLIC WORSHIP 27 not multiplying the number of celebrations, then we might as well wonder why it needs to be sacramentally present at all, and why the nuda commmemoratio is not more indicative of its working in us. Far from all this is the teaching of St. Thomas who states in the third part of the Summa, question 79, article 4, in the response to the third objection: In pluribus vero Missis multiplicatur sacrißcii oblatio. Et ideo multiplicatur effectus sacrißcii et sacramenti. We find the deep rationale for the celebration of the Eucharist in the fourth book of the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, distinction 2, question 1, article 2 in the response to the second objection: ... dicendum, quod ...Eucharistia ordinatur ad ultimum effectum passionis Christi, quasi completissime ab ea efficaciam habens; et ideo, quantum est de se, valet contra omnes spirituales defectus; unde et cum singulis sacramentis exhibetur, quasi consummans effectum uniuscujusque; sed tamen praeexigit alia sacramenta, ut idoneus quis reddatur ad tanti perceptionem mysterii, sicut etiam in naturalibus ultima forma non datur nisi praecedentibus omnibus dispositionibus. Here is truly the fons et culmen of the sacramental life of the Church. Let time, place and sacred things be ready in every Catholic Church for the priest who legitimately desires to celebrate the Holy Mysteries, and may the Church be freed from the shame of those who would impede him. I would like to add one last consideration which time does not permit me to develop. It is that the renewal of the sacramental economy in the Church would be mightily assisted by a reexamination of the doctrine of Dionysius the Areopagite. The corpus Dionysiacum puts the high scholastic doctrine of the sacraments in its natural context of the continuation into the visible world of the descending orders of the angelic hosts. It was the preferred authority of St. Thomas and the one the most indicative of his spirit. This doctrine shines as the great English Archbishop Ullathorne put it as "theology in its purest form, divested of controversy and written as if by a spirit with a pen of light."18 The rejection of the natural order of causes in directly responsible for the loss of metaphysical insight into the order of separated immaterial causes. The conviction of the continuity between the earthly and heavenly hierarchies, so often indicated in the liturgies of East and West and in the 18 The Autobiography of Archbishop Ullathorne, Third edition, London, Longmans, pg. 47.
