18.2 Sacraments (SCG 4,56–78)
As he moves from his discussion of the Incarnation to a discussion of sacraments, Aquinas refers back to what he says toward the end of SCG 4,55. As I have shown, he thinks that people saved by Christ need to keep striving to conform themselves to Christ. Or, as he puts it, “it was necessary to show people some remedies through which the benefit of Christ’s death could somehow be conjoined to them.”52 He goes on to say that the remedies required have to be “handed on with some visible signs.”53 And he takes these visible signs to be the sacraments of the Christian church as he understood them.
Aquinas thinks of sacraments as celebrated by ritual and as amounting to seven in number: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony. That there are just seven sacraments was not defined by the church in Aquinas’s day. It was the Council of Basel (1431–1435) and the Council of Trent (1545–1563) that formally declared the number of sacraments to be seven. Yet belief in there being only seven sacraments was widespread in Aquinas’s day, and he takes it for granted, though in SCG 4,58 he provides a brief defense of there being seven sacraments by comparing them with certain needs that people have just by being human.
In, Summa Theologiae 3a 60–90 we find a lengthy discussion of sacraments, one that was unfinished since Aquinas died having only just started to write on the sacrament of penance. By contrast with the treatment of the sacraments in the Summa Theologiae, the one to be found in the SCG is very short. Its main conclusions, however, are in line with what we find in the later Summa. Both works insist on the need for sacraments. Both think of sacraments as conferring grace and as bringing about certain effects as instruments of God. In addition, both of them contrast the sacraments of the Christian church with “sacraments of the Old Law,” both of them maintain that sacraments do not depend for their validity and effects on the worthiness of the people who preside over their celebration, and both of them approach the sacrament of the Eucharist by suggesting that it involves a change of substance. Finally, the discussion of sacraments in the SCG and the Summa Theologiae both speak of sacraments as empirically observable processes that do not bring something about just by symbolizing nonempirically observable realities. For Aquinas, a sacrament actually effects what the celebration of it symbolizes: grace flowing from the life and death of Christ.
18.2.1 The Need for Sacraments (SCG 4,56)
In SCG 4,56 Aquinas argues that we need the Christian sacraments since they apply to individuals what Christ achieved for all people by his death: salvation from sin and union with God. According to Aquinas, Christ died to reconcile people to God. But he does not think of Christ’s death as bringing about human salvation independently of how people react to it or act after Christ’s death. A tidal wave will wash people away regardless of anything they do in the face of it. In Aquinas’s view, however, the work of Christ has to be appropriated by individual people on a day-to-day basis, which is where the sacraments come in. These, he says, allow us to live our lives while doing specific things that free us from sin, keep us free from sin, or unite us to God in some way. In making this point, he does not offer an analogy to help us grasp what he is driving at. Yet it is not, perhaps, hard to provide one.
Consider a couple who marry. When they marry, they are, of course, married. But people have to work at marriages. And they have to do so as physical beings. So they will need to express affection in physical ways and continue to do so for as long as is possible. They will, for example, need to make love. And they will need to do something to get over disagreements. They will need, for example, to apologize to each other, and so on. The point I am making is that marriages succeed because of behavior. And, so it seems to me, Aquinas takes the “marriage” between God and people effected by the death of Christ to succeed on the same basis. He thinks that we have to work physically at being married to God. Or, in his words:
Instruments must be proportioned to their first cause. But the first and universal cause of human salvation is the incarnate Word. … Therefore, harmoniously the cure by which the power of the universal cause reaches people had a likeness to that cause; that is, the divine power operates in them under visible signs.54
In short, Aquinas holds that people living their lives in conformity to Christ need to express this conformity in physical ways. And he thinks that the sacraments of the church provide them with such ways and are necessary for just this reason. He does not say that all Christians need the grace conferred by the celebration of all of the sacraments. So he does not say that all Christians need to be married or to be ordained as priests. But he does say that all Christians need to be baptized, and he clearly implies that if those who are baptized live long enough, then they will benefit from the sacraments of penance, the eucharist, and extreme unction if they embrace them voluntarily and in good faith.
18.2.2 Sacraments of the Old Law and Sacraments of the New Law (SCG 4,57)
As I noted in chapter 15, section 2, Aquinas distinguishes between what he calls “the Old Law” and “the New Law.” For him, the Old Law amounts to commands, precepts, and prohibitions to be found in the Old Testament, while the New Law is what is declared by God in the teaching of Christ and in his death and resurrection. According to Aquinas, the New Law is what is in force given the life and death of Christ. And, he argues, this New Law leads us to see that there are sacraments we would not have believed in while reading the Old Testament. He acknowledges that people in Old Testament times, Jewish people living before the birth of Jesus, celebrated rituals that helped them to conform to God’s will for them. But, he says, these rituals only pointed toward the coming of Christ and do not draw on what Christ achieved by his life and death. So the rituals (sacraments) that we find noted in Old Testament texts should be thought of as things that people went in for while hoping for something better: human salvation through Christ. “The sacraments that preceded Christ’s Incarnation,” says Aquinas, “had to be such as signified and somehow promised salvation. But the sacraments which follow the suffering of Christ ought to be such as to deliver this salvation to people, not merely such as to point to it by signs.”55
18.2.3 Baptism and Confirmation (SCG 4,59–60)
Aquinas thinks that baptism takes away Original Sin and all of the sin and guilt of someone prior to baptism. So he maintains that baptism leaves the baptized without the need to satisfy for sins that they committed before baptism. He adds that baptism is fittingly celebrated using water since water is good for getting rid of “filth in bodily things.”56 He also argues that, considered as “a spiritual generation,” people should only be baptized once: a conclusion he takes to rule out the teaching of “Donatists or Rebaptizers.”57
Aquinas’s discussion of confirmation deals with that sacrament as celebrated in the West during his time. He thinks that it marks the mature and public embracing of grace while providing grace to continue to embrace it. Confirmation, he says, is “the sacrament by which spiritual strength is conferred on the one born again” and makes that person “a front-line fighter for the faith of Christ.”58 The celebration of confirmation, Aquinas adds, employs material and gestures that match the grace conferred by that sacrament.
18.2.4 The Eucharist (SCG 4,61–69)
In SCG 4,56–78, it is the sacrament of the Eucharist to which Aquinas devotes the most space, though the SCG discussion of the Eucharist is noticeably shorter than what we find in Summa Theologiae 3a,73–78. It begins by providing a brief account of what the Eucharist involves (SCG 4,61). Then, however, matters become more complicated and polemical as Aquinas proceeds to note “the errors of the infidels about the sacrament of the Eucharist” while offering a series of “solutions” to them (SCG 4,62–68).
The general account of the Eucharist in SCG 4,61 is fairly straightforward and amounts only to these points:
1. We need physical nourishment to help our bodies to grow and function well. Correspondingly, we need “spiritual nourishment” for “the spiritual life” so that “the reborn may both be conserved in virtues and grow in them.”59
2. Spiritual nourishment should be provided sacramentally by what looks like human food and drink. So the celebration of the Eucharist makes use of bread and wine.
3. In the Eucharist, the Word incarnate is “contained in his substance.”60 It is the flesh and blood of Christ that nourish us in the Eucharist.
In saying all this, of course, Aquinas is presupposing what he takes to be New Testament teaching. In SCG 4,61 he only cites John 6:56 (“My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink”). But, as later chapters make clear, Aquinas approaches the Eucharist in accordance with a literal reading of Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, and Luke 22:19, in which Christ is said to have handed bread and wine to his apostles while referring to it as being his body and blood.61 Aquinas takes these texts to mean that, before he died, Christ instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist in which people truly, not just figuratively or symbolically, take into themselves the body and blood of Christ. To the question “What is received by Christians who partake of the Eucharist?” Aquinas’s answer is “The body and blood of Christ” or just “Christ.” But he does not think that this is an easy idea to take on board or understand. Indeed, right at the start of SCG 4,63 he says that “the divine power operates with a greater sublimity and secrecy in this sacrament than a human being can search out.”62 Yet he resolutely sticks to the claim that Christ’s body and blood are truly received in the celebration of the Eucharist.
Why should he not? Critics of Aquinas’s approach to the Eucharist in the SCG have given many answers to this question, some of them based on their reading of the New Testament, some of them based on what they think it makes philosophical sense to say.63 Working, however, from the literal way in which he reads New Testament texts that he takes to record Christ’s institution of the sacrament of the Eucharist, Aquinas devotes SCG 4,62–68 to a discussion of it focusing on the philosophical possibility, or intellectual coherence, of what he takes it to be: the literal reception of the body and blood of Christ. As he says in SCG 4,68, he is out to explain that “what ecclesial tradition holds about the sacrament of the altar contains nothing impossible for God, who can do all things.”64
I am not going to provide a summary of the arguments in SCG 4,62 that Aquinas cites as intended to cast doubt on the truth about the Eucharist as he understands it (there are five of them, though he presents these as suggesting several related subarguments). Instead, I shall try to give you a sense of what he does and does not take the Eucharist to be.
18.2.4.1 What the Eucharist Is According to SCG 4,63–68
Given his beliefs concerning Christian teaching on the Eucharist, and given that he thinks that people celebrating this sacrament can be nourished by what is truly the body and blood of Christ, Aquinas could, of course, just settle for repeating the formula “The body and blood of Christ is truly received in the celebration of the Eucharist.” As I have shown, however, the SCG is shot through with what Aquinas takes to be illuminating thoughts coming from Aristotle, to whom he is indebted when trying to philosophize about the truth of the Catholic faith and how it might be expressed by “the wise person” mentioned in SCG 1,1–2 (see chapter 1, section 4 here). Unsurprisingly, therefore, he talks about the Eucharist while using Aristotelian terminology.
He says that if the bread and wine used in the celebration of the Eucharist become the body and blood of Christ, we can think of this as amounting to the coming-to-be of a substance without the accidents we usually associate with it. Christ comes to be in the Eucharist since “the substance of the bread is converted into the substance of the body of Christ, and the substance of the wine into the substance of his blood.”65
On this account, there is no bread in the Eucharist following the words of consecration used in the sacrament.66 The only substance present is Christ. Yes, says Aquinas, there are the appearances of what Aristotle would have called the “accidents” of bread and wine.67 But these are but accidents (involving quantity, qualities, relations). They are not the accidents of any substance. They are not accidents inhering in bread and wine since, following the words of consecration, there is no bread and wine. And they are not accidents inhering in Christ since Christ does not have the accidents of bread and wine. In the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, Aquinas holds, “what takes place is the contrary of what takes place in natural mutations, for in these the substance persists as the subject of the mutation, whereas the accidents are varied; but here, conversely, the accidents persist, the substance passes.”68 In Aquinas’s view, when it comes to the Eucharistic change God “conserves an accident in being, even after the removal of the substance which was conserving it.”69
One might wonder how it can be that, as seems to be the case, and as Aquinas takes St. Paul to say in 1 Corinthians 11:21, people can be physically sustained over time just by eating lots of consecrated bread and wine. And in dealing with this puzzle one might suggest that there is a point at which the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist turn back into bread and wine. Aquinas, however, prefers to think that the accidents of bread and wine remaining after the Eucharistic consecration are miraculously empowered to nourish us physically without being miraculously made to be the accidents of bread and wine. He writes:
It seems better to say that in the consecration itself, just as the substance of the bread is miraculously converted into the body of Christ, so this is miraculously conferred on the accidents: that they subsist which is proper to substance, and, as a consequence, are able to do and to suffer the things which the substance could do and suffer if the substance were present. And so, without a new miracle, they are able to inebriate and to nourish, to be burned and to rot, in the same way and order they would if the substance of the bread and wine were present.70
Does this mean that the body of Christ is broken up as the bread used in celebrating the Eucharist is broken up or as the wine used is poured into different cups or chalices? To this question Aquinas replies in the negative since he takes Christ to be present in the Eucharist, not as divisible into bits but as wholly present in all that is dimensively perceptible on the altar used for the celebration of the Eucharist. For him, the body of Christ, in its glory following Christ’s resurrection, cannot be divisible. It cannot be broken into parts. It cannot even be moved around. In his view, the body of Christ is present in the Eucharist sacramentally, not as a body with dimensions existing only in some particular place or in many particular places. We can, he holds, break up consecrated bread and wine, but we do not, thereby, break up the body and blood of Christ by anything that we do when celebrating the Eucharist. So, he says:
Since the body of Christ is in the sacrament by reason of his substance into which the substance of the bread—the dimensions thereof remaining—has been converted, as the whole species of bread was in every part of its dimensions, so the entire body of Christ is in every part of the same dimensions. Therefore, that breaking or division does not touch on the body of Christ so as to be in it as in a subject, but the subject thereof is the persisting dimensions of the bread or wine.71
As I said above, Aquinas might have summarized his SCG theology of the Eucharist by simply saying “The body and blood of Christ is truly received in the celebration of the Eucharist.” Instead, though, he uses Aristotelian language so as to suggest how we might think of the Eucharist as making sense of some kind. We should, however, notice that the “Aristotelian” notion of the Eucharist employed by Aquinas is not very Aristotelian. Aristotle, of course, had no notion of what Aquinas had in mind when writing about the Eucharist and did not try to defend this in terms of his own philosophy. More significantly, however, in his SCG discussion of the Eucharist Aquinas draws on Aristotle while saying things that Aristotle never asserted. For example, Aristotle never suggested that there could be accidents that are not those of an existing substance. Aristotle’s account of substance and accidents rules out the idea of there being accidents that are not the accidents of a substance. So it is not surprising that many people have noted this fact and contested what Aquinas says about the Eucharist as being incompatible with the philosophy of Aristotle.72
A good example of a famous theologian resisting what Aquinas says about the Eucharist as non-Aristotelian is Martin Luther (1483–1546). He declared that Aquinas seems to know “neither his philosophy or his logic” since “Aristotle speaks of substance and accidents so very differently from St Thomas.”73 Yet Aquinas is not concerned to be an “orthodox Aristotelian” in his discussion of the Eucharist in the SCG. He knows very well that Aristotle never thought of there being accidents that are not accidents of a substance. But he does think that we can take it to be possible for accidents to exist and to be observed as we celebrate the Eucharist, accidents not inhering in any substance. Just as he thinks that the Aristotelian notion of agent causation can be stretched so as to allow for an agent cause bringing about something from nothing as when God makes creatures to exist (to have esse), he thinks that God can bring it about that there is something (Christ) present in the Eucharist regardless of accidents that we might observe. Although Aquinas does not use the word “transubstantiation” when discussing the Eucharist in SCG 4, he is thinking of the Eucharist as involving a unique change of one substance into another one.74 As Herbert McCabe notes, however, “Aristotle could have made no sense of the notion of transubstantiation. It is not a term that can be accommodated within the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy; it represents the breakdown of these concepts in face of a mystery.”75
When he writes about the sacrament of penance in SCG 4,70–72, Aquinas is thinking of what contemporary Roman Catholics are more likely to refer to as confession: the admission of sin to a priest followed by absolution and the carrying out of some penitential act in recompense for the sin or sins acknowledged. This practice takes its biblical mandate from texts such as Matthew 16:19 and 18:18, John 20:21–23, and James 5:16. The practice was endorsed in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council, which ordered that “all the faithful of either sex, after they have reached the age of discernment, should individually confess their sins in a faithful manner to their own priest at least once a year.”76
On penance, Aquinas makes these points:
1. Although baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist confer grace, people are always able to fall into sin this side of the beatific vision. We can act in ways that are out of step with a life lived according to virtue. Our desire can come to fail to be fixed on God. Ignorance and passion can always lead us into sin.77
2. However, we can always be reunited to God by God’s grace. If we are always able to sin, we are always able to repent and return to being virtuous. If “sin takes place after grace is received, people can still be led back to the state of justice.”78 So much is taught by scriptural texts such as 1 John 2:1–2 and 2 Corinthians 2:6–7.79
3. The sacrament of penance is a remedy for sin committed after baptism. “If people sin after baptism, they evidently cannot have the remedy against their sin in baptism. And since the abundance of the divine mercy and the effectiveness of Christ’s grace do not suffer them to be dismissed without a remedy, there was established another sacramental remedy by which sins are washed away. And this is the sacrament of penance, which is spiritual healing of a sort.”80 For the sacrament of penance to heal us, however, we need to be sorry for our sins as graced by God to be so. We also need to seek God’s help concerning them while looking to Christ as redeeming us from sin if we value him and what he stands for. And we must make up for our sins in some way. So the sacrament of penance calls for us to be contrite, to cleave to God in Christ, to receive absolution of our sins from a minister of the church, and to make some amends for sins that we have committed—amends to be decided on by the minister to whom we confess, who represents the church.81
18.2.6 Extreme Unction (SCG 4,73)
The title of SCG 4,73 is “De Sacramento Extremae Unctionis.” We can translate this as “On the Sacrament of Extreme Unction.” But that translation needs some explanation. And here we need to note certain biblical texts. In James 5:14 we read: “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them in the name of the Lord.” This text led Christians to anoint the sick with oil as a symbol of healing and of consecration to God, following Old Testament texts that speak of oil as healing or soothing and as consecrating.82 And the church came to speak of this anointing as a distinct sacrament conferring grace and the forgiveness of sins, which is how Aquinas thinks of it.
But how sick do you need to be so as to receive the sacrament of the sick? Aquinas clearly thought that you need to be in danger of death so as to receive it and benefit from it. So we find him saying that “this sacrament is not to be given to anyone at all who is sick, but only to those who seem in their weakness to be approaching the end.”83 Here Aquinas is disagreeing with current Roman Catholic practice, which allows a priest to administer the “sacrament of the sick” to people who do not seem about to expire.
When he refers to orders, Aquinas is thinking of ordination to ministry in the church, especially ordination to the priesthood and consecration to the office of bishop. In accordance with church tradition, he also recognizes as orders what are commonly referred to as minor orders. Contemporary Roman Catholic teaching diverges from Aquinas when it comes to the conferring of minor orders, which are not now taken by Roman Catholics to be sacramental.84 Hence, we find the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) referring only to bishops, priests, and deacons as being in holy orders. Yet Aquinas, unoriginally and given his context, thinks of the conferring of all ecclesiastical orders, including various “minor” ones, as amounting to the celebration of a sacrament. He says, “The bestowal of all these orders accompanies some sacrament.”85
As he takes all sacraments to do, Aquinas takes the sacrament of Orders to confer grace on those who receive it properly.86 He also argues that it is needed if the church is to exist as a visible institution passing on to people the teaching of Christ while, as the sum of its members, receiving the benefit of Christ’s saving work. The sacraments, he says, “must be dispensed by visible people who have spiritual power,” as, for example, angels are not.87 It was, he suggests, “necessary that Christ should establish other ministers in his place who would dispense the sacraments to the faithful.”88 As we would expect, in making this point Aquinas cites a number of biblical texts, while going on to speak of those in orders as instruments of Christ working only through Christ’s authority and power. In SCG 4,74 he also argues that there is need for people able to preside over the sacrament of penance and that of the Eucharist, which leads him to think of the priesthood as a “principal” order in the church.89 Bishops, he thinks, come in as those with a “higher ministry which dispenses the sacrament of orders.”90 First among these is the bishop of Rome. Aquinas, whose approach to government is strongly monarchical, thinks of the pope as one person needed to govern the one true church. So, he writes:
The best government of a multitude is rule by one, and this is clear from the purpose of government, which is peace; for peace and the unity of his subjects are the purpose of the one who rules, and one is a better constituted cause of unity than many. Clearly, then, the government of the Church has been so disposed that one is at the head of the entire Church.91
With that said, Aquinas references biblical texts that he takes to endorse the view that the pope is the one head of the church to whom obedience is due. But, I might note, at this point he just quotes chapter and verse without trying to argue that the texts he cites are best interpreted as saying that the papacy, in any recognizable form, was instituted by Christ. Nor does he offer a historical analysis of the origin of the papacy. He simply assumes that it is a good thing that the Catholic Church has its pope as the leader of all Christians, while taking this to accord with the biblical texts that he cites. And he concludes his discussion of orders while reiterating his anti-Donatist sentiments as presented in SCG 4,59. Ordained ministers of the church, he says, validly celebrate sacraments even if they are sinners. “The power of their orders persist in the ministers of the Church perpetually. Therefore, it is not taken away by sin. Therefore, even sinners and evil men, provided they have orders, are able to confer the sacraments of the Church.”92
Married people today will, perhaps, be astonished by SCG 4,78. For it is extremely brief and would not, by today’s standards, pass muster as an essay on the theology of marriage. However, it is not presented as being such an essay. Its purpose is only to make some comments on marriage on the assumption that marriage is a sacrament that confers grace, as Aquinas takes all sacraments to do. So, in SCG 4,78, Aquinas settles for making some points that he takes to cohere with things that he has previously said in the SCG concerning our sexual organs and the use to which we might put them. He says that sexual intercourse is necessary if people are to survive as a species, from which it follows that “Matrimony, in that it consists in the union of a husband and wife purporting to generate and educate offspring for the worship of God, is a sacrament of the Church; hence, also, a certain blessing on those marrying is given by the ministers of the Church.”93 So, Aquinas concludes:
There are three goods of matrimony as a sacrament of the Church: namely, offspring to be accepted and educated for the worship of God; fidelity by which one man is bound to one wife; and the sacrament, and in accord with this there is indivisibility in the marriage union, in so far as it is a sacrament of the union of Christ and of the Church.94