Lost in Wonder

Essays on Liturgy and the Arts

Aidan Nichols O. P.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032099248
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317103264
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book explores the Liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the Liturgy carries can produce. The conclusion offers a synthetic statement of the unity of religion, cosmology and art. Aidan Nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples which draw on the best in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

PART 1
Explorations of the Liturgy

Chapter 1
St Thomas and the Sacramental Liturgy

Liturgy as a Pattern of Signs

St Thomas Aquinas, the foremost thinker of the Dominican Order and the classical theologian of the Latin church, 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 which 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 où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles:
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols …3

(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 Here we must recall that to the ancients ‘mirror’ and ‘enigma’ were closer than they are for us. In earlier times, 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 where 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 thumbnail description of the wider Liturgy might read: the Liturgy is the total complex of signs at work in the Church’s worship for the purposes of the divine sanctification of human beings. That is broad enough to include the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Office, the sacramentals (a word which means ‘little sacraments’), and the other ceremonies that make up the complete pattern of Catholic worship – its sacramentality in a more extended sense than the septet of great sacraments as defined by the Council of Trent. It is not good for the sacraments to be alone, divorced from their context in the wider worship of the Church. Nor, for that matter, from the role of sign in the entire divine Economy. To cite Vagaggini again, ‘The liturgy … is nothing else than a certain phase of revelation, a certain way in which the meaning of revelation is realized in us.’7

The Congruence of Sign in the Divine Plan

For Thomas it is altogether appropriate that God should lead human beings to supernatural communion with himself through sensuously perceptible signs. As he writes in his little treatise ‘On the Articles of the Faith and the Sacraments of the Church’, it is congruent that God grants his grace through bodily things.8 When the divine freedom embraced the purpose of human salvation nothing compelled it to use this particular means. But that it should so do was altogether suitable. As always, when Thomas speaks of convenientia – appropriateness, congruence, fittingness – we have a tacit appeal to theological aesthetics.9 Theological ‘convenience’ for Thomas denotes how the divine Wisdom selected really quite the best means for realising the mystery of salvation and so the glorification of man in God. Wisdom itself – or, rather, himself – chose the human body to be the gateway of salvation. That for Thomas is an example of the characteristic beauty of the divine ordering of the universe in creation and redemption. In St Thomas’s Latin, ‘the beautiful’ is termed pulchrum. So we could say punningly, it was pulchrum that the body be the fulcrum of human salvation. The body is the fulcrum, or as the North African writer Tertullian put it in a pun of his own in the third century: our flesh – in Latin, caro – is the ‘hinge’ – in Latin, cardo – of our salvation.

The Relevance of Thomas’s Anthropology

This raises the question of Thomas’s anthropology, his account of man. In a Positivist philosophical climate, such as that of modern Britain, it may seem odd to mention it, but Thomas was going against the grain of much ancient philosophy when he insisted that the human body was absolutely integral to the human person.10 Though the soul alone is by nature indestructible and therefore immortal, man is nonetheless one single reality of body and soul together. He is, as Thomas tersely remarks, unum simpliciter.11 The soul may be the actuating principle of the human being, but it is the body that renders man a concrete reality. Using the matter–form analysis of such realities he had learned from Aristotle, Thomas stresses that only with the help of its matter can form unfold its own dispositions and perfect them.12 The body, so understood, belongs intrinsically with the human personal subject, the suppositum or hypostasis. This is the source of its distinctive dignity as a human body and what befits it for possible entry into the realm of grace.

The place of the body in personal soul-life is reflected in its role in human knowledge. The working of the mind is so dependent on the body for the content of thinking that even sheerly intellectual objects are mediated to it through a process which begins with the senses.13 In a Thomist maxim, omnis cognitio incipit a sensu: all knowledge starts from the senses. Now the norms of human understanding apply analogously to the realm of salvation as well. Were it not so, supernatural life would damage natural life, rather than fulfil it.14 It is appropriate, then, that knowledge of the divine offer to bring man salvation should likewise have its origin in the senses. Thus in the Tertia Pars of the Summa theologiae where Thomas is thinking specifically of the principal liturgical signs, the sacraments, he makes the point that the rationale for the sacraments is the same as that for verbal imagery in the Scriptures, the primary testimonies of revelation. The Bible uses imagery because it is connatural to man to acquire knowledge of the spiritual order through signs that are grounded in the sensuous realm. What is true of the Word of God written in Scripture is no less true of the ‘spiritual and intelligible goods through which man is sanctified’, the ‘sacred things signified by the sacraments’.15 So the divine Economy, by the way it has disposed saving history, renders man a liturgical being but in such a fashion that this is in conformity with our human nature as such.

In the single most important doctrinal statement of the Roman magisterium on the Liturgy, the encyclical Mediator Dei of 1948, Pope Pius XII grounded the not only interior but also exterior character of the Church’s worship on a twofold consideration which bears a strong family resemblance to Thomas’s. First, man is naturally a body–soul composite. Secondly, divine Providence has so worked in the history of salvation that ‘recognising God through the visible we may be drawn by him to love of the invisible’. Here the Pope cites the Preface of the Nativity in the Roman rite, itself a mosaic of texts from the sermons of his predecessor St Leo the Great.16 This passage of the encyclical is almost certainly a reprise of Thomas, who uses the same Leonine text in a similar context.17

A Caveat

Reference to the ‘invisible’ invites the caveat that Thomas cannot be presented as a ‘Christian materialist’ for whom man is simply a ‘ceremonious animal’. Indeed, he remained close enough to the Platonist tradition to hold that, in the words of a recent Irish study, the divine Essence:

can only be known in the most sublime way when the human mind is able to function independently of the senses.18

What begins in the senses does not necessarily end there, as the Beatific Vision will demonstrate. In the De Veritate Thomas maintains that, though initially it is natural to know God through sensory experience, in the beatified state it will be ‘natural’ for human intelligence to know the Essence of God through divine assistance.19

It would be not only crass but unfaithful to Thomas’s world-picture as a whole were we to draw from his emphasis on the role of the senses the conclusion that, applied to cult, the mere performance of ritual activity, by outwardly ‘active’ participation, meets the needs of liturgical man. Once again, Thomas is far from materialism. As the Canadian Thomas scholar Anton Pegis wrote in a celebration of the seventh centenary of Aquinas’s death:

[For Thomas] embodiment is not to be understood simply as the existence of the soul in the world of matter; on the contrary, it is the existence of the body in the spiritual world of the soul itself. The existence, the life and the economy of the human composite derive from the nature of the soul, so that it is not strictly correct to say that in the human composite the soul is in the body; it is more proper to say that the soul exists in the body – and in the world of matter – only because the body exists in the world of the soul.

And Pegis concludes:

The human body is matter existing and functioning with and within the life of the intellectual soul.20

For Aquinas, writing in an imagistic mode which is more connatural to him than some critics of Scholastic abstraction allow, the intellectual soul of man exists on the ‘horizon’ and, as he writes, at the ‘confines, as it were’ between things bodily and things incorporeal. It is itself intelligent substance and not just the form of a body.21 Naturally, this has implications for worship. When St Thomas declares the soul to have its being ‘above motion and time, touching eternity’, accepting from that Neoplatonically-inspired text the Liber de Causis the soul’s situation ‘on the horizon below eternity but above time’, this cannot be without consequenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1: EXPLORATIONS OF THE LITURGY
• PART 2: THE SETTING OF THE RITES
• PART 3: RESPONSE TO THE WORD
• Conclusion – By Way of an Ending: Religion, Science, Art
• Index