Tag Archives: Thomas Aquinas

Eating a Story

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Corpus Christi is an odd feast. Almost all of the other feasts celebrate an event in the life of Jesus or the life of a saint. Corpus Christi is focused on the doctrine and devotion to the Eucharist. Only the Feast of the Trinity has a similar focus insofar as it celebrates a doctrine fundamental to Christianity. The trouble with celebrating either feast as primarily doctrinal is that doctrines in themselves seem lifeless. Who besides mathematicians can get excited about the paradoxes of one and three, and who but scholastic theologians can get excited about what the Real Presence in bread and wine is all about?

The Trinity, of course is not a doctrine, and it isn’t really a mathematical puzzle for that matter. The Trinity is a story of creation and redemption and sanctification. Not that each person of the Trinity is confined to one of those roles. All three Persons do all three and much, much more. The sacrament of the Eucharist also celebrates a story, the same story that is told about the Trinity. (See Trinity as Story and Song.) The Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, is one important incident in the story of Jesus coming to earth as a helpless child, living a life of a human vulnerable to whatever other humans choose to do to him, dying on a cross when that is what humans chose to do, rising from the dead, and being seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly places. We have celebrated this story one step at a time, starting with the expectations of Advent all the way through to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Trinity Sunday puts the whole story together in one big celebration and then Corpus Christ does the same from a different angle.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that God relates to God’s creatures according to their mode of reality. In the case of humans, this means that God relates to us, material creatures that we are, through the material world in time and in history. The Eucharistic rite takes place in time. It incorporates past times, most particularly the times when Jesus suffered and died and then rose again, but also the time when the Israelites were delivered from the Egyptians at the Red Sea, an event recalled at the Passover for the Jews. The Eucharistic rite also takes place in the present moment when it is celebrated. Whatever events on both local and world fronts are incorporated into the celebration and offered to God. Moreover, God’s promises for the future when all will be made one in Christ are present as well. That’s a lot of time and history to be contained in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

Discussions of real presence and dolling the sacrament up in a monstrance for Benediction both have some danger of reifying the Body and Blood of Christ. However, use of one’s intelligence to perceive some intelligibility in the holy Mysteries is part of what it means to be an embodied human being. This is salutary as long as one is willing to allow what intelligibility that emerges to remain surrounded by mystery. Dressing up to celebrate is another facet of our embodied way of living. It is the kind of celebration we engage in to honor people we love and respect. The important thing to realize is that we are eating and drinking some powerful stories when we partake of the bread and wine, and we are celebrating these same stories deep in our hearts as we pray before the dressed-up sacrament. These stories of deliverance from slavery and the suffering of the Prince of Peace inform the way we prayerfully incorporate contemporary events and they prepare us for how we should live out our stories as parts of the greater stories embodied in the sacrament. These same stories have prompted many liturgical theologians to stress the importance of social concerns and outreach as necessary outcomes of the Eucharistic celebration.

There is a human expression about eating our words. The implication is that our words come back to haunt us in some way. It is perhaps worth thinking about whether or not what we say is worth consuming for others, let alone ourselves. In any case, eating the words of Jesus is profound nourishment, nourishment to eternal life. When we receive the bread and wine at the altar and consume it, we are swallowing the story of Christ hook, line, and sinker. By swallowing this story, we live our own life stories within the life story given us by the Word made Flesh.

A Story Worth Swallowing

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When someone believes a tall tale, we say that person swallowed it hook, line and sinker. A more skeptical person, on hearing what sounds like a tall tale might say: “That’s more than I can swallow.” Sometimes we say that a voracious reader devours books. When one goes to church, one often hopes to be fed by the preacher’s sermon. In The Phantom Tollbooth, the boy Milo wanders through a strange world where, upon being invited to a banquet, he starts to make a shallow speech and is dismayed when he has to eat his meager words. When Moses said that God had taught the Israelites that they don’t “live on bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord,” (Deut. 8: 3) he was witnessing to the power of words, of stories, to sustain us just as surely as food feeds and sustains us.

The Passover is a meal where the table fellowship is imbedded in a story, the story of the Angel of the Lord’s passing over the houses of Israel and the subsequent delivery from Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea. The participants are nourished by the food served and they are also nourished by the story they celebrate. St. Paul reminds the Corinthians of the last meal Jesus had before he died, a meal that Jesus wanted to be repeated in his memory. (1 Cor. 11: 23-26) Like the Passover, with which Jesus’ meal is closely related, it seems to have normally been a meal for feeding the participants as well as celebrating the story of Jesus. Unfortunately, very bad manners on the part of some of the more affluent Corinthians led Paul to recommend separating the meal from the celebration of the story, an impoverishment that persists to this day. John, telescopes the meal and the story into an eternal present, as he does throughout his Gospel. Reliving the violence of Jesus’ passion by gnawing on the bread (such is the force of the Greek verb) and also reliving the Resurrection are made into a tight unity in the climax of Jesus’ discourse after the feeding of the people in the wilderness. (Jn. 6: 51-58)

The Feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the Presence of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Body and Blood inspired by the visions of Juliana of Liège, a 13th century Norbertine canoness, and the thought of her contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas. The Thomistic term of “substantial presence” doesn’t seem to excite many people today, but the hymns Thomas wrote for the feast suggest that such terms did inspire a strong sense of devotion in the great Dominican thinker. For Thomas, the term “substance” was powerfully substantial. The elaborate Corpus Christi processions that evolved from this feast look more than a little triumphant when the Person present in the host is an Eternal Loser in the heavens but this is a loser still trying to make all of us winners for losing.

In any case, we need to remember that this presence in the sacrament is a person and a person lives a story. Is this a story we can swallow? It isn’t too hard to believe that a popular person was accused of many crimes and put to death. This is a story that has been told of many people many times, but this sort of story is a bitter pill to swallow. The Resurrection of Jesus sounds to many like a whopper that nobody can swallow, however nice it might be to swallow a story that gives us life. This is not the time or place to argue the truth of the Resurrection. Let it suffice that the death and Resurrection of Jesus is the story we swallow when we partake of the Eucharist. It is a story that touches on our vulnerability, both physical and moral, one that is sobering but also hopeful. It is a story that challenges us to be as life-affirming in the face of human death-dealing as Jesus was. There’s a lot of substance in all that!

God Knows All About Unicorns

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Early in my monastic life, when I wanted to know everything, I read the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a thinker who knew everything, or seemed to. Many of Thomas’ insights and speculations continue to nourish me. The insight that I dwell upon and dwell in more than any other comes in Question 14, article 9.

Thomas has been enumerating what God knows, which, not surprisingly turns out to be everything. In article 9, however, Thomas poses the question of whether God knows everything that has never existed, does not presently exist, and never will exist. One might think that this, at least would stump God, but Thomas blithely insists that God knows these things as well. Huh?

Basically, Thomas says that God knows everything that could exist. That includes everything which God does bring into being as well as everything which God does not bring into being. This is an important point. We take our own existence and the existence of the things in the world for granted. God takes nothing for granted. God chooses some things to exist out of an infinitude of possibilities.

So what about unicorns and all else that allegedly do not exist? What does God have against them that God did not bring them into being? The answer is God has nothing against anything. The deeper answer is that God leaves many things to our imaginations. We can’t imagine horses; they are already here. But we can imagine unicorns and dragons and creatures from other planets that may or may not exist. What I find so awesome about Thomas’ insight is that God invites us to enter into God’s imagination to glimpse a few of the infinite number of beings that will never exist. God encourages us to welcome into this life many creatures we otherwise would never see and get to know. Not only do we get to pet the cats who live at our monastery, but we get to ride dragons through the air!

It is because God has invited me into small visions of the divine  imagination that I can introduce you to Korniel, Pandara, Merendael, and many others. If you wish to meet them for yourself, you can read Creatures We Dream of Knowing and From Beyond to Here. Knowing them has enriched my life. I hope it will enrich yours as well.