Thomystagogy

Urban Hannon, Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentaries on the Mass (Lincoln, Nebraska: Os Justi Press, 2024).

It was a commonplace among twentieth-century theologians of a certain stripe that Thomism was cold, rationalistic, and “dry as sawdust” as one put it. As if the Common Doctor and his students were cut off from the life-giving streams of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church. This was one of the ideas motivating the ressourcement movement of the last century. But if you read Saint Thomas for more than five minutes, and especially if you read his work, rather than reading him only through the lens of some of his successors, you see how absurd and unfounded an idea this is. 

The criticism we see in general we also see in particular, with certain theologians’ desire to get beyond the Thomistic theory of transubstantiation, as if a vague theology of hand-waving more effectively described the mystery than a theology using the infrastructure of Aristotelian philosophy. As if mystery meant our theology must be imprecise.

To read Saint Thomas is to see how scriptural and patristic his theology is, how deeply he has drunk from these sources. All those who reject scholasticism and especially Thomism in favor of a theology built on the writings of the Fathers would do well to recognize that this is exactly what the scholastics have given us. Peter Lombard’s organization of the patristic patrimony in his Sentences served not as the springboard, but as the very foundation for the truly systematic theology of Saint Thomas and the schoolmen. 

The Holy Spirit has revealed that Divine Wisdom “orders all things sweetly.” Thus, to those who are wise, to those who participate in that Wisdom, does it belong to order, as Saint Thomas teaches with the Stagirite. And who has given more order to the edifice of Catholic theology than Aquinas?

Saint Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist is a profound reflection upon this mystery which lies at the center of our Christian life. Who recognized better both the heights of what theology can achieve and its utter inability to comprehend completely the mystery of God than the one who wrote:

Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,
Quia te contemplans totum deficit

better than the one who wrote:

O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passionis eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.

better than the one who said, “I have seen such things in prayer that all I have written seems to be straw”? Not ‘sawdust,’ mind you, and not ‘straw’ as we might think of it either, dry and good for nothing but as kindling and fodder for beasts. In the famous quote, Saint Thomas was using a concept common in medieval thinking, that the literal sense of Sacred Scripture is merely the ‘husk,’ which must be broken open to access the corn, the truly nourishing kernel of the spiritual senses. Not that the ‘husk’ or ‘straw’ of the literal sense can ever be thrown away, but that it is merely the first step in coming to understand the truth. In this sense, his work certainly is ‘straw,’ not fodder for beasts, but fodder for contemplation.

Our former editor Urban Hannon has given us an important book as we contemplate the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, which is at the center of our lives as Christians, and which therefore ought to be at the center of the life of a Christian people. It is an especially timely contribution, as we honor the 750^th anniversary of the death of the Common Doctor this week. 

Fr. Hugh Barbour notes in his introduction that this book serves as the second panel of a diptych with the work of Dom Anscar Vonier. In his Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, the abbot of Buckfast detailed the sacramental representation which is at the heart of Saint Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist. Vonier gave us the Thomistic theory of how this sacrament signifies, Hannon collects for us Saint Thomas’s writings on that signification as we find it in the rites, words and gestures of Holy Mass. As Hannon indicates, Saint Thomas reads the liturgy like he reads the Scriptures. Beneath the ‘husk’ of the literal sense, Saint Thomas finds the deeper spiritual meaning, an often-allegorical reading of the kind which has been so disdained in modern liturgical scholarship, but which is so fruitful for our Christian life.   

Though unlike many of his contemporaries, Saint Thomas did not compose a standalone commentary on the Mass, he did comment upon it in two of his works, in his Scriptum on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and in the Summa Theologiae. Mr. Hannon assembles these texts for us into a running commentary. Helpful appendices provide the Latin texts themselves, with Hannon’s own accurate and eminently readable translation, plus several useful diagrams. 

Hannon analyses Saint Thomas’s commentary on the Mass according to the four causes, spending most of his time on the material cause, what is said and done in the Mass. The other three causes correspond to Saint Thomas’s various divisions of the Mass. He divides it according to its form, for instance in his Sentences commentary, seeing in the structure of the Mass a pattern of exitus-reditus. He also makes a division according to who is speaking—a kind of instrumental efficient cause, since God Himself is the primary agent in the liturgy—either the priest alone, the ministers, the choir, which enable “the whole hierarchy of the mystical body to be represented” (15). As a final cause in the Mass, there is a division according to signification: “For St. Thomas, the words and actions of the Mass come together for the sake of signifying three things: the representation of Christ’s Passion, the disposition of the Church, and the devotion and reverence due to this sacrament” (21).

Saint Thomas’s commentary reminds our age of widespread liturgical minimalism that what is important in the Mass is not merely the essential, what is necessary for the validity of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Nothing is superfluous, the whole of the rite is important, including “the things said around the sacrament,” which are not for the sacrament’s validity, for its being, but “are for the sacrament’s well-being” (ST III, Q. 66, a. 10 ad 4). 

If this book has a shortcoming it is its brevity; it is little more than an essay. It leaves you wanting more. Perhaps there is sense in this, as a meta-level comment on our theology of the Eucharist itself. But at times one feels that more could have been said. A clarifying comment here and there would have been helpful. But this is to a certain extent mere hair-splitting. It is a short book, but one which offers much food for thought, one to which we can return again and again as we contemplate the mysteries we celebrate.