St. Thomas and the Sacramental Liturgy

The Thomist 72 (2008): 571-93 ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY AIDAN NICHOLS, 0.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, Great Britain I. LITURGY As A PATIERN OF SIGNS SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS is, among other things, a philosopher and theologian of the sign.1 For him the sacramental Liturgy belongs to the order of signs. And this is surely correct. The Liturgy is a pattern of signs and symbols that speak to our senses of the spiritual realities they seek to represent. So much might be said, of course, of any worthwhile art form,2 and the Symbolist poets of late-nineteenth-century France held it to be true of nature itself. As one of their number, Charles Baudelaire, wrote in his sonnet Correspondances: La nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles: L'homme y passe atravers des forets de symboles ...3 1 For a philosophical account of signs, see J. Haldane, "The Life of the Sign," The Review ofMetaphysics 47 (1994): 451-70. A mainly theological account, indebted to Thomas but not exclusively so, is E. Masure, Le Signe. Le passage du visible a/'invisible (Paris, 1948). 2 A connection eloquently made, and tl1en applied to the sacraments, by me Anglo-Welsh lay Dominican artist and poet David Jones in the essay "Art and Sacrament," published in H. Grisewood, ed., Epoch andArtist: Selected Writings by DavidJones (London, Faber and Faber, 1959), 143-79. Of relevance to the present essay is C. C. Knight, "Some Liturgical Implications of the Thought of David Jones," New Blackfriars 85 (2004): 444-53. 3 Cited, with discussion, in P. Mansell Jones, Baudelaire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 32-33. 571 572 AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. (Nature is a temple whose living pillars emit now and then confused words; man passes that way through forests of symbols. . . .) In a theistic context, Aquinas draws close to Baudelaire's viewpoint in the Disputed Questions on Truth when he affirms that natural knowledge of God in this life comes about per speculum et aenigma sensibilium creaturarum, "through the mirror and enigma of sensory creatures."4 For the ancients "mirror" and "enigma" were closer than they are for us. Mirrors were highly polished metal where one might have to peer hard to make out that which was mirrored. At any rate, enigmatic mirrors must be the starting point for our enquiry, for as Dom Cipriano Vagaggini, principal architect of the new Eucharistic Prayers in the Roman Missal of 1969, explains, "the whole liturgical economy ... falls under the concept of sign."5 I only hope my account will not be too enigmatic-much less, in Baudelaire's word, "confused." For Thomas, to specify the liturgical sign we have to mention something further. The liturgical sign in particular is to express the reality of the holy-the reality of the holy as pertinent to human salvation. Because the Liturgy operates in a context in which the order of the day is not natural truth but a saving truth which, by definition, goes beyond the natural, this particular set of signs can only be approached by the distinctive understanding that comes from faith in divine revelation. Though, as we shall see, the primary saving sign for Thomas is the humanity of the Word made flesh, in the Church of the Word incarnate this unique sign is itself represented by the ritual signs we call the sacraments. Thomas is speaking in the formal perspective of Christian faith when he defines a sacrament as "the sign of a holy reality insofar as it makes human beings holy."6 But sacramental theology-the study of such signs-does not flourish when sundered from a theology of the Liturgy as a whole. A similar 4 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae De Veritate, q. 13, a. 2. 5 C. Vagaggini, O.S.B., Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy: A General Treatise on the Theology ofthe Liturgy, trans. Leonard J. Doyle and W. A. Jurgens (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1976), 32. 6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 60, a. 2. ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY 573 thumbnail description of the wider Liturgy might read: the Liturgy is the total complex...