Folia Theologica 20. (2009)
Barbour Hugh: The Cosmology of Catholic Worship: Pre-Socratic Sacraments? A Consideration by a disciple of St. Thomas Qauinas
8 BARBOUR, Hugh God and delighted in its worship. He could say with the Psalmist 'I was glad when they said unto me let us go unto the house of the LORD'." Now a Calvinist view of worship, with its late medieval nominalist metaphysic, is about as far from the concrete sensibility of the Ionian Greek as one can imagine: mere ordinances of worship dependent on the sheer and sovereign will of God, not containing in itself the realities signified, but rather signs merely of the irresistible grace of God in its foreordained workings in the elect, a worship which simply explains, but does not bring about, a fact already accomplished in its most universal scope before the foundation of the world. For the Calvinist such as my great-great-great grandfather, the only certain link to the world of the Pre-Socratic, the world of the sensate man reflecting on the real cosmos of the movement and change of the elements, would be the shorter canon of the Scriptures, written by those ancient Eastern Mediterranean people with their ancient appreciation of the sensible world and the forces which underlie it. Yet his worship would not have recognized the power of the Catholic Paschal Vigil in which the Scriptures are set within the context of divinely efficacious fire, water, earth and air, of "the grain, the wine, and the and oil."2 My Calvinist ancestor would rather have seen in Catholic Worship the survival of the paganism of the Greeks who first looked out from the shores of Asia Minor, or at best the remains of a Judaic bondage to carnal observances. I on my part am happy that I profess the faith my ancestors' ancestors (a convert from Protestantism to the Catholicity, like Pázmány Péter, the great founder of this University) and so can go inside the house celebrate Holy Mass with my travel Mass kit, facing the sun rising over the earth as the waters and the ocean breeze combine to play a musical élévation over the ancient Eucharistic canon, the four elements combining to greet the descending glory of the One who said "and if I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all things to Myself."3 Quæstio Disputata When I last spoke here, in addition to the introductory rhetorical flourish, I patterned the speculative substance of my paper on the fa2 Jeremiah 31:12. 3 John 12:32.
