Thomas Aquinas and Transcendent Liturgy
The reawakening of interest in the system of Thomas Aquinas and its importance in the re-imposition of orthodoxy continues apace. Philip Goddard examines some recent books on aspects of the thought of the Angelic Doctor.
Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy by David Berger, pb, St Austin Press, £8.95
Thomas Aquinas for Today by Doctor N.A. Morris (eight booklets, each 24-38 pp), pb, Hoath House (22 Pentre Street, Glynneath, Neath, SA11 5HA), £14.00 per set, plus £2.00 p+p.
Thomas Aquinas on the liturgy? Surely not! What could he possibly have of interest or importance to tell us in the twenty-first century? Did he not simply accept uncritically the decadent liturgy of the Middle Ages, a decadence from which it was only finally rescued by the post-Vatican II reformers? Surely, as one modern scholar, quoted here, remarked, “Thomas had…obviously no great sense for liturgy”?
Well, it may come as a surprise to some of our modern liturgists, but as the possessor of the sharpest mind in the twelve centuries of European history between Augustine and Descartes, Thomas Aquinas was not actually in the habit of accepting anything uncritically. If he accepted the Roman rite of his day as it stood, it was not because he had no sense for liturgy, but because, unlike most of the post-Vatican II minnows, he had a very strong sense of the standards by which good liturgy should be evaluated, and on that basis he did not think that the contemporary Roman rite stood in need of any radical reform.
The aim of Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy is set out by the author on the first page: “Following decades of ill-advised reforms and experiments with the liturgy that mostly cast aside all tradition, many different voices have been raised calling for a ‘start from within’, a ‘rediscovery of the living centre’, a ‘penetration of the living fabric of the liturgy’, which then might be able to offer the measure for what is permissible and/or required in the liturgy”. Why invoke the aid of St Thomas in this task? Because, as so many Popes and Councils of the Church (including Vatican II) have made clear, St Thomas has always been regarded as “a light of orthodoxy and a shield against heterodoxy”. Berger quotes, among others, Pius XI’s comment that, “modernists…are amply justified in fearing no doctor of the Church as much as Thomas Aquinas”. And, as Pius XII says (in Mediator Dei), “In the sacred liturgy we profess the Catholic Faith explicitly and clearly by the celebration of the Mysteries, by the offering of the Sacrifice and by the administration of the Sacraments”. It follows that we cannot simply divorce St Thomas’s theology from his views on the liturgy, commending the former as the most profound insight into the truths of the Catholic Faith whilst stigmatising the latter as naïve and insensitive. Lex orandi, lex credendi; faith and liturgy go together, or not at all.
Berger is well qualified for the task he has set himself. Saint Thomas’s comments on the liturgy are scattered throughout his works, and to assemble them into a coherent theology of the liturgy requires the kind of encyclopaedic knowledge of those works which Berger, more than almost anyone else today, possesses.
To St Thomas, the essence of the Mass is theocentric, not anthropocentric. It is God created, not man created. It is, he tells us, at one and the same time a figurative re-presentation of Christ’s Passion, and thereby a true sacrifice, and a channel of the fruits of His suffering, whereby the latter are rendered efficacious for our redemption, and thereby a true sacrament. It is indeed the greatest of the sacraments, the one towards which all the others are oriented. In it, Christ the High Priest offers Himself to His Father as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. Berger again appositely quotes Mediator Dei, that “the priesthood of Jesus Christ is a living and continuous reality through all the ages to the end of time, since the liturgy is nothing more nor less than the exercise of this priestly function”. The sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrifice of the Cross are essentially identical, linked by the identity of the sacrifice, of the primary sacrificing priest and of the objective. The difference is one of presentation; in contrast to Calvary, the sacrifice of the altar is a mystical and bloodless one, in which Christ, the High Priest, acts through His representative, the celebrating priest. The modern notion that the priesthood of the laity is of the same nature or degree as that of the ordained priest, or that the latter acts in the name and as the representative of the congregation, is wholly incompatible with St Thomas and with sound Catholic doctrine.
Because all knowledge comes to us through our senses, the sensual aspects of the Mass, the physical gestures and symbols which have largely disappeared in celebrations of the Novus Ordo, are of the utmost importance to St Thomas. For example, the numerous signs of the Cross made over the bread and wine in the course of the Canon, both before and after the Consecration, are not to him useless repetitions but are interpreted in a symbolic way; thus the triple sign at the words, “These gifts, these offerings, these holy unblemished oblations” indicates the handing over of Christ through God, through Judas and through the Jews, and the double sign at the words, “that it may become to us the Body and Blood of Thy beloved Son” indicates the persons of Judas the seller and Christ Who was sold, and so on. This allegorical interpretation of elements in the liturgy is deeply out of fashion in our day, and is widely regarded as a decadent medieval invention. In fact it is much older than the Middle Ages; in the fourth century, for example, we find Theodore of Mopsuestia (Hom. Cat. 4. 25-29) interpreting the offertory procession as a symbol of Christ being led out to His Passion; and the placing of the offerings on the altar as the laying of His body in the tomb. While we may legitimately query the more extreme manifestations of allegorical interpretation which are to be found in such medieval commentators as Amalarius of Metz or Sicardus of Cremona, we should be careful before rejecting out of hand a feature of the liturgy which is both extremely ancient and has the authority of St Thomas in its support.
Saint Thomas would have had little time for those twin pillars of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform, didacticism and activism, which have been largely responsible for the loss of the transcendent in, and desacralisation of, the Eucharistic liturgy. He would surely not have denied that the reading and exposition of the scriptures is designed to deepen our knowledge of God’s word, or that the laity have an important (though subordinate) role to play in the celebration of the Mass. But the notion that these are what the Mass is mainly about would have been utterly foreign to him.
Though Berger does not emphasise the point, St Thomas was of course also well aware of the memorial aspect of the Mass; in the Adoro Te Devote he describes it as the “memoriale mortis Domini”, and again in his collect for the Corpus Christi Mass he refers to it as the “passionis tuae memoriam.” But he never allows it to dominate his theology of the Mass to the detriment of its sacrificial and sacramental aspects, as, alas, has happened in the liturgy of the post-Vatican II period.
Berger explores St Thomas’s idea of the liturgy as a “locus theologicus”, a principal source of sound theology, to the extent that it has received the approval of the Church’s teaching authority. Not only does St Thomas hold that the only truths of faith which must be adhered to by all, both educated and uneducated alike, are those which have been made the subject of a feast by the Church, but he also appeals, for example, to the Christmas liturgy as a source of insight into the doctrine of the Incarnation, and to the Preface for Trinity Sunday, into that of the Blessed Trinity. Indeed, a fine example of what he means can be found in his own sequence for Corpus Christi, the Lauda Sion, in which the doctrine of the Eucharist is expressed in language as beautiful in its clarity and economy as any to be found in the Roman liturgy. He is however always conscious that the liturgy is an expression of the orthodoxy which the Magisterium of the Church protects, and that Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium belong together. It is not hard to deduce what he would have thought of the “experimental liturgy” which has been so regrettably prominent in the post-Vatican II period.
Berger’s book is clearly written, in a style which is easily assimilable by the ordinary, intelligent, reader. Nobody therefore without a philosophical or theological background need fear to embark upon it. The author has followed the excellent practice of quoting St Thomas’s text in translation together with the original Latin (usually in a footnote). It is not, however, entirely without blemishes; the malign influence of the automatic spellcheck can be discerned here and there, in the conversion for example of “jubilatio” to “jubilation” and “creditur” to “creditor”. And the passages quoted from the Lauda Sion are translated into a turgid English verse format which not only fails to reflect the admirable economy and precision of St Thomas’s Latin but unfortunately also sometimes obscures his theology. Since the reader is presumably not intended to sing the passages aloud as he reads there is really no reason why they should not have been translated into clear and unambiguous English prose, and I hope that this will be done if the book, as it deserves, goes into a second edition.
Thomas Aquinas for Today consists of a series of eight short pamphlets in which various aspects of St Thomas’s teaching are explained and their relevance to present day situations discussed. Each pamphlet is short enough to be read at a single sitting. The format works well for such matters as Ecology, Morals and Marriage, where St Thomas’s teaching is shown to be rooted in the natural law and the divinely determined balance of the universe, and where a return to his guiding principles is crucial to the well-being, indeed the very survival, of humanity. It is less happy when applied to the core of St Thomas’s philosophy, his ontology, which requires much more extensive treatment, if it is to be intelligible to the modern reader, than it receives here. I was surprised, too, that in the author’s analysis of philosophical ideas opposed to St Thomas, figures such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre are included, but not Hume, the founding father of British empirical philosophy. My advice to anyone who wishes to acquire an overall grasp of St Thomas’s ontology and epistemology is to beg, borrow or steal a copy of Fr Copleston’s excellent Aquinas, published by Penguin in 1955 but sadly long out of print.
[Taken from the Latin Mass Society's August 2005 Newsletter.]
Thomas Aquinas - a reply from the author of Thomas Aquinas for Today.
In his review of my series of booklets on Thomas Aquinas (Mass of Ages, August 2005), Philip Goddard fails to mention that the whole point of dividing Thomas Aquinas for Today into booklets was to enable them to be bought separately so that readers can get a taste of St Thomas in a subject that interests them.The full list of booklets is: 'The Meaning of Things', 'Metaphysics', 'Physics', 'Ecology', 'Morals', 'Marriage', 'Politics', 'Economics', 'Peace' and 'The Universal Doctor'. The booklets are available at £2.00 each including postage (telephone 01639 722358 to order).
I wrote the series as an easy and readable intorduction to the philosophy of Saint Thomas, which was promoted by Leo XIII, in his 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris, to to be the primary philosophy taught in Catholic seminaries.
The series is for the general reader, not for professional philosophers, although the first two booklets do contain an unavoidable minimum of philosophical explanation.
[Taken from the Latin Mass Society's November 2005 Newsletter.]
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