Folia Theologica 20. (2009)
Barbour Hugh: The Cosmology of Catholic Worship: Pre-Socratic Sacraments? A Consideration by a disciple of St. Thomas Qauinas
18 BARBOUR, Hugh the word as equivalent in each case, on account of the more general context of the acts of the virtue of religion which require an external act. Thus the promise made by vow is related to the external act not yet accomplished, it is not simply a desire for the effect of the sacrament but an interior promise made regarding the sacrament itself. Here we are dealing merely with the order of abstract intentionality, but with an application of understanding to the concrete order of individual acts to be accomplished externally. We are outside the order of the sacraments only in the sense that the actual sign has not been applied, but not outside the order of the virtue of religion to which the sacrament belongs as an external rite, and the intention directed at this external composite sign. An analogous place will shed light on this. In the case of the virtue of prudence which directs the reason in judging what is to be done concretely, the difficulty arises of how the prudence which resides in the reason, which is the faculty of universal concepts, can know material singulars in order to act. Here is what St. Thomas says in the Secunda Secundae, question 47, article 3, in the response to the third objection: Ad primum ergo dicendum quod ratio primo quidem et principaliter est universalium, potest tamen universales rationes ad particularia applicare (unde syllogismorum conclusiones non solum sunt universales, sed etiam particulares); quia intellectus per quandam reflexionem se ad materiam extendit, ut dicitur in III de anima. Thus in our case of the sacrament received in voto, the mind and will are extended to material reality per quandam reflexionem. So even here we have not left the order of application to composite signs. Of course we are dealing here with the return to the phantasm, essentially material and singular in nature, which characterizes all properly human knowing and willing. This phantasm is the fruit of the perception of the senses and so is the result of the human soul's use of external things, elaborated in the case of baptism in voto by the power of the intellect and will, but in no wise leaving the order of mobile material things in order to achieve the object of its intention, but rather directed to that very order as it can have, by the power of Christ, a genuine spiritual effect in the soul. By way of illustration only, and in order to edify my hearers I now offer a marvelous text, which shows how deeply imbedded in the Thomistic synthesis is the order of the four causes, even if the text
