Folia Theologica 20. (2009)

Barbour Hugh: The Cosmology of Catholic Worship: Pre-Socratic Sacraments? A Consideration by a disciple of St. Thomas Qauinas

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BARBOUR, Hugh

Epistle to the Hebrews and in the Apocalypse will make us eager to join heaven and earth more frequently and efficaciously by the fervent celebration of Holy Mass and the other Sacraments which have the Eucharistic Sacrifice as their end and consummation in the order of sacred signs.

Concluding Rhetorical-Poetic Peroratio

As I began by descending first to the lower level of rhetorical art in order to gain the benevolent attention of my hearers, now I trust they will suffer me to end with it, indeed with what is an even more lowly form of discourse, a poem, the poema, a concrete "thing which is made." The English Romantic Poet William Wordsworth, a case of nomen, omen if ever there was one, expressed very well the dissaggio of the modern Christian, cut off from the serene perspective of the ancients, feels when he contemplates the contrast between his modernity, with the banal rationalism in thought and moralizing minimalism in worship of contemporary "mainstream" religion, with the vigor and purity of the pagan. No longer confident of the integrating power of the Christian mysteries, he turns to a nostalgia for the worship of the forces of nature. In his famous Petrarchan sonnet he tells us:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not - Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

The rankest, naïve paganism has a more vibrant sense of the transcendence and immanence of divine things given and received, of the