Summa I-II q.102 a.5 (replies 2–4): The Passover meal, the sacraments of the old and new law, and ritual uncleanness

Orientation #

He opens after the prayer with “we come to the secundum here, in question 102, article five” — i.e. he resumes at the reply to the second objection, the first reply having been done previously (prev. lecture). He ends by saying “we’re up to the ad quintum” and calls a break. The previous class reached only the reply to the first objection, on circumcision.

The class, in order #

1. The reason “of the letter” for the Paschal banquet (“I don’t like that translation”) #

He objects to rendering ratio litteralis as “literal reason”: better “the reason from the letter,” as against reason from the thing.

• The Paschal banquet commemorates the benefit of being led out of Egypt; by celebrating it one professes to belong to the people God took out.
• The blood of the lamb on lintel and doorposts: a protestation of receding from the rites of Egypt, who worshipped the ram; by that aspersion they were freed from the danger of extermination threatening the Egyptians.
• Two things in the exodus: (a) haste, (b) the manner of eating.
  • Haste shown in what they ate: unleavened bread (no time to ferment, being forced out); meat burnt by fire (quicker to prepare); and no bone to be broken — a student supplies: no time to break bones.
  • Haste in the manner: loins girt, shoes on feet, staves in hand, eat swiftly — “men existing in the promptitude of a journey.” Also: eat in one house, carry no flesh outside, because in their haste they could not send out xenia (gifts).
• The bitter herbs (he puzzles over the Latin for lettuce; “wild lettuce,” “bitter herbs,” a student offers “parsley”) signify the bitterness they underwent in Egypt.

2. The figurative reason of the Passover (“our Paschal offered up is Christ”) #

Each element of the rite is matched to what it figures:

• Immolation of the lamb — immolation of Christ (1 Cor 5; immolatus translated “sacrificed”).
• Blood on the doorposts — faith in the passion of Christ in heart and mouth, by which we are freed from sin and death (1 Pet 1: redeemed by the precious blood of the immaculate Lamb). He notes the Litany of the Precious Blood.
• Eating the flesh — eating the body of Christ in the sacrament; the fire — the passion, or the charity of Christ.
• Unleavened bread — the pure life of those taking the body of Christ (1 Cor: the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth).
• Bitter herbs — penance for sin, “necessary for those receiving the body of Christ. Important to remember that.”
• Loins girt — chastity (a student supplies cingulum/“signature” [unclear in recording]).
• Shoes — made of dead skins, i.e. the examples of the dead fathers. Aside: they carried the bones of Joseph though handling bones of the dead made them impure; St Ephraim treats this as a figure of the Eucharist — Christ is not dead, yet we carry his body.
• Staves — pastoral custody or care.
• One house — because in the Church of Catholics there is no conventicle of heretics.

Aside: asked once by Warren Murray which line of Shakespeare best describes heaven, he quoted the last line of Two Gentlemen of Verona: “one house, one feast, one mutual happiness” — praised also for the very brief reconciliation of Proteus and Valentine, and the difficulty of forgiving as if nothing had happened.

3. Ad tertium: which sacraments have Old-Law figures (“to circumcision corresponds baptism”) #

Correspondences: circumcision → baptism, the sacrament of faith (Col 2: circumcised in the circumcision of Christ, buried with him in baptism); the Paschal banquet (convivium — the word Thomas also uses of heaven, “an ineffable convivium”) → the Eucharist; all the purifications → penance; the consecration of priests and high priests → order. Four with a direct correspondence. Three without:

1. Confirmation, “the sacrament of the fullness of grace” — no Old-Law figure, because the time of fullness had not come: the law brought no one to perfection. He remarks that this title is not emphasised enough in practice (usually “adulthood,” “soldier of Christ”), and that he likes to put the question to priest friends and watch them stumble.
2. Extreme unction, the immediate preparation for entrance into glory — nothing corresponds, the price not yet being paid, glory not open. He prefers “the last anointing” to “extreme unction.”
3. Matrimony was in the Old Law as an office of nature, but not as a sacrament of the joining of Christ and the Church — shown by the bill of repudiation Moses allowed, which is against the ratio of the sacrament.

Exchanges and asides: the Eucharist called the sacrament of charity, confession “a plank thrown to you after your shipwreck” (hope); discussion of the modern name “sacrament of the sick,” and the old vessels marked oleum infirmorum, with the misconception that one must wait until the last moment; a confirmation class that could not collectively name the seven sacraments; his own private tutorial with Father Dulac after outstripping a required religion course; a newspaper item, “Ben Franklin and the Holy See” — Franklin consulted in 1783 about the first American bishop, recommending Carroll, whose son (or relation) was an attentive Jesuit priest, and thence the Baltimore Catechism and Georgetown. “Amazing how rich the text of Thomas is” — one could give a whole lecture on this tertium.

4. Ad quartum: the two worships impeded (“ordered to removing the impediments of the divine worship”) #

Purifications remove impediments to divine worship, which is twofold: spiritual (devotion of the mind to God) and bodily (sacrifices, offerings and the like).

• Spiritual worship is impeded by sins — idolatry, homicide, adultery, incest — from which men are purified by sacrifices, common or individual. Not that the carnal sacrifices of themselves had power to expiate sin, but they signified the future expiation through Christ, of whom the ancients were partakers by faith, professing faith in the Redeemer in the figures of the sacrifices. He asks how many of them knew what these figures meant: some did, some did not.
• Bodily worship is impeded by bodily impurities, considered first in men, then in animals and in clothing.

5. The bodily uncleannesses in men (“everything is regarded as unclean from which some corruption”) #

Uncleanness in men is partly from themselves, partly from contact with unclean things. From themselves: whatever has undergone or been exposed to corruption. Hence the dead body, death being a corruption (he cites Heraclitus: the body more fit to be cast out than dung, and notes the Jewish practice of burying at once, and the specially-clad teams who gather body parts after a bombing without touching them). Leprosy, from corruption of the fluids erupting outward and infecting others. The woman in a flux of blood, whether from infirmity or nature, and at the time of childbirth. Men in a flux of seed, from infirmity, nocturnal pollution or intercourse. All such humidity issuing from a man has an unclean infection.

Asides: a Latin-American custom of the mother’s bath four days after birth; the blessing of the mother after childbirth in the Roman ritual, and a family who brought their firstborn to the monastery for it; a remark that such unclean things are used in curses in literature.

6. The reasons of the letter for these uncleannesses (“on account of the reverence of those things”) #

1. Reverence: men do not touch precious things when unclean. His own instances: not picking up good books with hands soiled from eating; a child spilling something on his three-volume church history; and the old pastor’s complaint about lipstick at communion, with the group’s remarks on lipstick on the chalice and linens.
2. Rarity: since these uncleannesses are common, men rarely come to divine worship, and therefore come with more reverence and humility. Attached aside: Father Poulé’s rule of three editions — a pocket book for the train, a desk copy, and the venerable copy (the Leonine Thomas; a big Shakespeare); a student notes you can now have them all on your computer.
3. So that men would not fear to approach divine worship, refusing the company of lepers and others whose sickness was abominable and contagious. Here the group discusses the woman with the flow of blood whom Christ cured: she was unclean and knew she was in some way violating the law by touching him — courage in her; and “Someone touched me,” said in the midst of a crowd.
4. To avoid the worship of idols, since the Gentiles used human blood and seed in their sacrifices.

All such bodily uncleannesses were purified by sprinkling of water, or, in greater ones, by a sacrifice for expiation. Aside: the Asperges as a survival of this, now largely musical and part of the penitential rite; whether “casting aspersions” is connected; a dog shaking after a pond; and “asperges Marcus” while drying dishes, with the knock-knock joke (“John the Baptist”).

7. The ratio figuralis of the uncleannesses (“figured diverse sins”) #

Reading the figures one by one (he quibbles over the English of immunditiae, “impurities” vs his “uncleanlinesses”):

• Uncleanness of a corpse — sin, the death of the soul.
• Leprosy — heretical doctrine: because it is contagious, and because no false doctrine is unmixed with truths, as the leper’s skin shows stained parts distinguished from flesh still intact. Group: leprosy is in fact among the least contagious (Damien of Molokai took many years to catch it); and a leper seen in the Caribbean, healthy but for fingers gone to the bone. “That’s what heresy is: a mixture of the true and the false.”
• The woman in her blood flow — idolatry, on account of the blood of the victims immolated.
• The flux of seed — vain speech, since the seed is the word of God.
• Coition and childbirth — original sin, as transmitted.
• The menstruating woman — uncleanness of mind through softness of pleasures. (Aside: “Don’t try to explain this from the pulpit.”)
• Universally, uncleanness by contact with an unclean thing — consent to another’s sin (2 Cor 6: go forth from the midst of them, be separated, touch not the unclean thing).

Uncleanness by contact passes also to inanimate things: whatever touches an unclean thing becomes unclean. He notes the reverse case of relics — a cloth touched to a relic of the true cross becomes a third-class relic; and a friend’s stapler once used by Frank Duff. The law here weakens the superstition of the Gentiles, who held uncleanness contracted even by speech or sight, as Rabbi Moses says of the menstruating woman. Mystically signified in Wisdom 14: alike hateful to God are the impious man and his impiety — “he doesn’t always love the sinner, then.”

8. Uncleanness in houses, garments and vessels (“the law calls leper law”) #

• Leprosy of house and clothing: as leprosy comes from corrupt putrefying fluid, so from excess of humidity or dryness a corrosion arises in a house or garment; the law calls this corruption the law of leprosy. Because all corruption pertains to uncleanness, and because the Gentiles worshipped household gods as preservatives against such corrosion, the law commanded that such houses be destroyed and such garments burnt, to remove the occasion of idolatry. (“I don’t know about you, Thomas, you’re really gone.”)
• Vessels: vasa quae non habent operimentum nec ligaturam desuper are unclean — no cover, no binding, since something unclean easily falls in (“put the cover on the milk and the cork back in the bottle”). Also against idolatry: idolaters believed that if a mouse or lizard offered to idols fell into vessels or waters it was most pleasing to the gods; and some women left vessels uncovered in honour of nocturnal deities called Janas — “it’s obscure things here.” Aside: surviving superstitions in Italian regions and among Lebanese — the turquoise stone worn against the evil eye, worn by Christians who do not know it is superstitious.
• Figurative reasons for these: leprosy of the house — the congregation of heretics; leprosy in the linen garment — the perversity of flatterers; in the woollen garment — the vices of the soul; in the warp — vices of the soul; in the woof — sins of the flesh, “as the warp is in the woof, so is the soul in the body.” The vessel without cover or tie — the man who has not the veil of taciturnity and is restrained by no censure of discipline. “I love that. That’s what so many people need today, the virtue of taciturnity.” (The reading of linen/woollen is confused in his own delivery, and he does not sort it out; a student supplies “linen garment.” (inferred: Augustine’s De moribus Manichaeorum is the work he gropes for when he says “have a work on the morals of the Manichees.”))

Closing asides: the statue of St Benedict at Spencer; the grandfather apologising for noisy grandchildren at Mass, and his own remark to Rosalie that with small children “it’s like I wasn’t at Mass.”

His words #

• “reason from the letter” / “reason of the letter” — his preferred rendering of ratio litteralis, against “literal reason”; contrasted with reason from the thing.
• xenia — gifts they could not send out because of their haste.
• immolatus — translated in class as “sacrificed.”
• convivium — banquet; used by Thomas of the Passover meal and of heaven, “an ineffable convivium.”
• “the last anointing” [ed.: extreme unction] — his preferred translation of extrema unctio.
• “sacrament of the fullness of grace” — Thomas’s title for confirmation, which he says is not emphasised enough.
• immunditiae — “uncleanlinesses” (he notes the usual translation “impurities”).
• ratio figuralis — the figurative reason, as against the reason of the letter.
• “law of leprosy” — the law’s name for corrosion in houses and garments.
• “the veil of taciturnity” — what the uncovered vessel signifies the lack of.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 102, a. 5, ad 2, ad 3, ad 4 (ending at the start of ad 5).
• Quoted within it: Exodus 12; 1 Corinthians 5 (twice); 1 Peter 1; Colossians 2; 2 Corinthians 6; Wisdom 14; Rabbi Moses [ed.: Maimonides] on the menstruating woman.

Mentioned

• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, final lines: “one house, one feast, one mutual happiness.”
• Heraclitus on the body being fitter to be cast out than dung.
• St Ephraim on the bones of Joseph as a figure of the Eucharist.
• Augustine on the morals of the Manichees (inferred).
• A newspaper piece, “Ben Franklin and the Holy See.”

His questions #

• Should ratio litteralis be translated “literal reason”? No — better “reason from the letter,” as opposed to reason from the thing.
• Why were the unleavened bread, the roasted flesh, the girt loins and staves commanded? All designate haste and the promptitude of a journey out of Egypt.
• What does the blood on the doorposts figure? Faith in the passion of Christ in heart and mouth, by which we are freed from sin and death.
• What line in Shakespeare best describes heaven? “One house, one feast, one mutual happiness.”
• Which Old-Law sacrament corresponds to confirmation? None: the time of fullness had not come, and the law brought no one to perfection.
• Why is there no Old-Law figure of extreme unction? Because it is the immediate preparation for entry into glory, and the price was not yet paid.
• Did the carnal sacrifices of themselves expiate sin? No; they signified the future expiation through Christ, of which the ancients partook by faith.
• How many of the ancients knew what the figures of the sacrifices meant? Some did, some did not.
• Why does leprosy figure heretical doctrine? Because it is contagious, and because false doctrine mixes falsehood with truth as the leper’s stained skin is mixed with intact flesh.
• What does the vessel without cover or binding signify? The man who lacks the veil of taciturnity and is restrained by no discipline.