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 21 Plato and Aristotle. And the membra disiecta of all of these modern perspectives are found on the Catholic side in the historicism of the Modernists, the "Aquikantianism" - as your great countryman of happy memory the monk Stanley Jaki put it - of Rahner, the Positivism of the proponents of the ressourcement, the political romanticism of "Liturgical Movements" of left and right. The perspectives of our objectors show traces of all of these. Alone and against all these, the Church continued in the Council's decree on Priestly Life to require that her clergy be formed ea ope speculationis Sancto Thoma magistro with his synthesis of the whole tradition, of Scripture, the Fathers, and the practice of the Church, innixi patrimonio philosophico perenniter valido.9 Recently, though and hopefully more in practice than in theory, there has been a tendency among the neo-Orthodox to ignore this patrimony in the matter of the theology of the sacraments. Not so much in Christology, nor in Moral Theology, even less in Canon Law, but in the area of the essential rites of the Christian religion, in the realm of worship. It is as if on this most practical area of the Church's life the modern critique of the old ancilla theologiae had rendered them overly cautious of asserting anything with speculative certainty. The sacraments are treated as if they were phenomenal manifestations of some underlying substance, a general and universal intention, without essences and integrity of their own. Most of the time they function as though they were discrete sensible realities, but in the "limit cases" (the expression used by the redactors of the document on the salvation of unbaptized infants) such as those mentioned in the objections, their basic identity with some general spiritual reality, be it the universal salvific will, the unity of the priesthood, or the historical weight of centuries of practice, is asserted against their having specific, determinate, composite, substantial natures in their own sacramental order of signs, as do all the other things God has made in their various orders. The sacraments are described, their practice vindicated, their external accompaniments ordered and reordered, but how they work is left to theory, or reduced to some other reality not properly sacramental. Here is the Pre-Socratic treatment of the sacraments: any account will do, as long as it is merely phenomenal and does not involve the full development of the ancient cosmological order of the four causes, and most especially those which are essential 9 Optatam totius: 15-16.
