Part
Three - of christ
Now we get to the heart of the Summa, where the broad, philosophical
sweep of Part One connects with the deeply personal human insights
of Part Two in a simple act of healing presence that is signified
by the mystery of the Incarnation and the sacrament of the Eucharist.
And how does Aquinas join these two very different worlds? By
describing the model for their joining in the Incarnation and
the life of Christ, and by describing the sacraments, the means
by which we experience the healing presence of this joining
and
the means by which we are helped along on our path to the happy
self-awareness of the divine.
mystery and revelation
As you recall from our earlier discussions, God is the name
we give to the mysterious cause of existence. And what we know
of
the Trinity, the insight into the particular nature of this mysterious
cause of existence, we know through revelation, the words of
Jesus
in Scripture and church teaching that conforms to Scripture.
As we said, Aquinas doesn't think such information is provable,
or
anything we would necessarily would have deduced ourselves. Yet
he thinks it is true, that it is a deep spiritual insight that
helps us recognize what existence (and the mystery behind it)
is actually like, and that it will of course be consistent with
what we find
out
on
our
own
using reason.
The Incarnation and the Eucharist are truths of this nature,
statements that set the highest context by which we understand
the essential fabric of the world, the nature of human beings,
the point towards which we are evolving, and how we can best
get
there. In Part Three, the big mysteries all come together: the
essential mystery of God, the self-awareness of God as described
by the Trinity, the joining of this to a human being in the Incarnation,
and the ongoing presence of this historical joining through
space
and time in the sacraments, particularly the sacrament of the
Eucharist.
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