‘Liturgy’ or the public worship of the Church lies at the exact meeting point of faith and culture. We need a spirituality that enables us to rediscover the Liturgy. The most powerful thing in Catholicism should be the most beautiful thing also. Catholics need to recover the eyes of the Christian imagination, the eyes of a pure heart - eyes capable of seeing into what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’. Those are the eyes that can read the world (as the mystics of the Church have always done) as a book speaking of the mysteries of Christ, and Christ as the revealer of the Father’s love.

What follows is intended as an aid to this much-needed ‘rediscovery’ of the Liturgy: an extract from the paper John Saward gave at our 1999 summer conference, concerning the exegesis of the Mass. The full version will be available in Second Spring magazine. (For anyone wishing to read more about the 'exegesis' of the Mass, we recommend an excellent book by another of our Advisers, Fr Michael L. Gaudoin-Parker: 'Heart In Pilgrimage: Meditating Christian Spirituality in the Light of the Eucharistic Prayer', Alba House, NY, 1994.)

THE COSMIC LITURGY AND THE WAY OF THE LAMB

Retrieving the Tradition of Spiritual Exegesis of the Mass

The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas has often been compared to a cathedral. The structure of words, like the structure of stone, radiates the brilliance of order, that mark of a wise man whether in the science of theology or in the art of building. Thomas knows how everything ought to fit together and makes sure it does. He joins roof to walls and foundations, end to beginning. In the First Part he speaks of the Triune God and of creatures coming from Him. In the Second Part he considers man, the rational creature, and his movement back to God. Finally, in the Third Part, he contemplates the incarnate Word, who as man is man’s way to union with the Trinity. 

St Thomas’s cathedral has a grand plan, and yet he left it unfinished. Compared with the grace of vision he received on the feast of St Nicholas 1273, it seemed to him like straw. For us, though, whom God has not thus gifted, the ‘infants in Christ’ for whom St Thomas wrote this beginner’s guide, there is a strange completeness in the incompleteness of the Summa. Its last finished treatise is devoted to the Holy Eucharist, and the last question of that last treatise is on the rite of the Sacrament, that is, on the significance of the place and time in which it is celebrated, of the words uttered and the actions performed. 

The final act of St Thomas was, as it were, to offer Holy Mass on the high altar of this basilica of the intellect. You might say that, having begun with the cosmic liturgy, the universe created by God for His glory, he ends with the way of the Lamb, through whose sacrifice God is most perfectly glorified. This is a fitting conclusion, a completion in incompleteness, because, as the Angelic Doctor himself says, ‘[T]his Sacrament embraces the whole mystery of our salvation’. Now since the mystery it considers is so wonderfully comprehensive, this eighty-third question of the Third Part is in a certain way the summa Summae, that is, the final perfection of all the sacred doctrine that has gone before it, the crowning of the philosophy and theology of the Church’s Common Doctor.

I believe that study of this forgotten corner of the Summa can contribute to the ‘reform of the reform’ of the liturgy, for it will help us recover a way of looking at the Mass, the saints’ way of looking at the Mass, to which our poor late twentieth-century eyes have grown unaccustomed. From what we know of his own way of celebrating the Holy Sacrifice, as well as from the content of this treatise, it is evident that Brother Thomas approached the great ‘cosmic liturgy’ with a childlike wonder and humility. 

What at first may surprise us, but eventually should enlighten us, is that St Thomas admires some of the very features of the traditional Roman Mass - for example, the repetition of gestures - that liturgical reform has stripped away in the cause of ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘active participation’. Now St Thomas recognized that in the rite of Mass, as in the rites of the other Sacraments, there is a difference between essence and accidentals. 

The essence of the rite, what makes the Sacrament a sacrament, has been instituted by the God-Man Himself and cannot be changed, but the accidentals of the celebration, the things instituted by the Church to ‘excite devotion and reverence’, can, and indeed have been, changed by that same Church. However, the Church is the Bride of Christ and is guided into all truth by His and the Father’s Holy Spirit, and so St Thomas insisted that her sons in every generation should cherish and revere her liturgical discipline, even concerning accidentals. 

This is a reassuring reminder for all. First, it shows that Holy Mother Church did not lead her children astray when her visible head promulgated the new rite of Mass. But, secondly, it proves the need for reverence for that older rite which the same Holy Mother, Christ’s beloved Bride, treasured for a millennium and a half. St Thomas gives us a new way - which is the most ancient way - of meditating on the Mass. His commentary will enhance our appreciation of the traditional rite, but it should foster devotion to the Eucharistic Sacrifice in whichever rite of the Church it is offered.

I believe it can contribute to what the Popes have called the ‘evangelization of culture’. From the catacombs, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has been the inspiring centre of Christian art. As the present Holy Father has said: ‘The cathedrals, the humble country churches, the religious music, architecture, sculpture, and painting all radiate the mystery of the verum Corpus, natum de Maria Virgine, towards which everything converges in a movement of wonder’.