Aquinas' journey similar to ours
SARAH RYKOWSKI
News Writer
Father Thomas O'Meara brought Thomas Aquinas into the new millenium in his lecture "Real People and Real Presence: Thomas Aquinas on the Sacraments", held on Saturday as part of the day-long Third Annual Thomas Aquinas Symposium.
"The issue for us is to go on a journey," O'Meara said. "We go on this journey not by steps but by the actions of our lives. The sacraments mark special events on the journey [of life]."
O'Meara opened his lecture with remarks about journeys in life. Thomas Aquinas' journey through life, is similar to our own, O'Meara said.
"In that journey to college is Aquinas' whole life," O'Meara said. "He leaves his whole family for the big city. He leaves a platonic way of life for science and a world of images for one of an Aristotelian era. He leaves the monsastic world to join the Dominicans. All those journeys are taking place at the edge of a new era, the High Middle Ages. He walks into his destiny. He walks into those worlds and likes them. He was a person of enormous self-confidence at 17."
O'Meara related Aquinas' work, the Summa theologiae, as describing a journey.
"The sacraments take place within the journey," O'Meara said. "They pertain to the human life cycle. Grace draws nature to its destiny."
The final journey that O'Meara discussed was the journey of ordinary human life, and how they relate to the sacraments and their particular order.
"The sacraments are for real persons. They are not for dead people," O'Meara said. "Sacraments contact people through their senses and emotions. The reason we have sacramentsis because we are animals endowed with sense and reason. The sacraments are going to reach our minds through the senses. The grace comes through the contact with the sense, although not all grace comes through the sacraments."
The primary focus of O'Meara's lecture on Aquinas was the sacrament of the Eucharist.
"It's unlike all the others," O'Meara said. "The divine in it is not fluid. In the Eucharist, the divine is present and stays there. Aquinas' reason for the real presence [of Christ in the Eucharist] was that what is most characteristic of friendship is presence. Friends hang out with friends. God wants to be with us because God wants to be our friend."
O'Meara then tackled the concept of the Eucharist and its accidental and divine components.
"The risen Christ is in the Eucharist," O'Meara said. "The substance was the underlying reality of the thing. All of the accidents remain. What we perceive still
remains: the bread and the wine. Our faith sees something deeper," he continued. "Our faith says that the underlying reality is that of Christ."
With his final thoughts, O'Meara related Aquinas' concerns about the different views of the Eucharist. One theory, still prevalent today, is that the Eucharist is merely a symbol.
"This is heretical because it is contrary to the words of Christ," O'Meara said. "[Aquinas] prefers to call them signs, [because] the sacraments are not only symbols."
All News Stories for Monday, February 7, 2000
