The revival of Thomistic philosophy and theology is one of the most important developments in Catholic thought of the last quarter century, as well as a major contribution to medieval studies. Relatively few people, however, are familiar with the Angelic Doctor as a liturgical theologian. This rich, accessible, and concise work by the late Fr. Franck Quoëx will help to change that.
Liturgical Theology is a set of essays arranged by the editor and translator, rather than a deliberately crafted monograph. Despite this, it coheres remarkably well. It is a study of Thomas’s theology of “cult,” that is, the external aspects of worship which bring out the doctrinal substance of the rite and the sacramental sign (6). Although the author acts primarily as an expositor of Aquinas’s text and mostly consigns scholarly debates to the footnotes, the influence of Pierre-Marie Gy and Niels Rasmussen on his thought is evident.
Quoëx focuses on three treatises from the Summa Theologiae: on the Old Law (I-II, q. 98–105), on the moral virtue of religion (II-II, q. 81–110), and on the sacraments (III, q. 60–65). There is a progression according to the sequence of salvation history as Thomas presents it: before the Mosaic Law, under the Law, and under grace. This results in five chapters organized around major themes: the anthropological foundations of cult; the worship prescribed in the Mosaic Law; Christ’s own worship and sacrifice; the Christian sacraments; and the Eucharist as the chief sacrament. In addition, there are two appendices on Thomas’s expositio missae (excerpted from III, q. 83) which analyze and assess the Angelic Doctor’s commentary on the rite of the Mass.
The Thomistic axiom that grace presupposes nature and perfects it is crucial for Quoëx. The opening chapter on the anthropological basis of cult is fundamental: if ritual worship is natural to man, then the claim that such worship is alien to Christianity loses its force. The author relies on the contributions of contemporary religious anthropology alongside Aquinas’s teaching to establish what external cult is and why it is necessary. He offers definitions of key terms, such as the virtue of religion, devotion as its principal act, adoration, and sacrifice. The last of these is the most perfect of all acts of cult and is offered to God alone. For Thomas and Quoëx alike, interior devotion must find its expression in acts of external worship.
Aquinas treated the cult of the Mosaic Law as a figure of the cult of Christ and of future beatitude (48-49). He claimed that the great number of precepts in the Old Law was divine pedagogy to prevent the Israelites from falling into idolatry, but that they also benefited from so many opportunities to manifest and stimulate their interior devotion. The Angelic Doctor distinguished between literal and spiritual explanations of the Mosaic ceremonies, that is, between the carrying out of prescribed observances, and perceiving the supernatural realities signified by the observances (54). Before the coming of Christ, however, the Mosaic rites could only signify those supernatural realities quite imperfectly, and their main purpose was to prefigure something greater to come. Aquinas thus correlated the four sacraments of the Mosaic Law—circumcision, the paschal lamb, sacerdotal consecration, and rites of purification—with Christian Baptism, Eucharist, Holy Orders, and Penance (61).
Quoëx next treats Thomas’s teaching on the cult of Christ, which begins with a consideration of his role as mediator between God and men. This consists of a descending movement in relation to men, and an ascending movement in relation to God. According to Thomas, Jesus exercised his priesthood during his earthly life principally by offering himself in sacrifice for the remission of sins, which was the culmination of a self-offering begun in the Incarnation.
The Church’s sacraments, the power of which flows from Christ’s priestly offering, both sanctify their recipients and entail acts of worship. According to Aquinas, they signify the divine cult and the sanctification of man in an efficacious manner, unlike the sacraments of the Mosaic Law. Quoëx highlights Thomas’s frequent use of the terms cultus and ritus in this section of the Tertia Pars as indicating an increasingly liturgical perspective during his later years. The author attributes to Aquinas the signal achievement of providing an improved explanation of the sacramental character, which he defined as a supernatural active potency that makes the recipient capable of actions in conformity with the state in which he has been constituted by the sacrament received (99). The three sacraments that impose a character—Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders—and allow their recipients to participate in the priesthood of Christ, making them capable of performing the acts pertaining to the Christian cult.
The two appendices on the expositio missae strike a somewhat different note from the rest of the volume, because they engage most directly with the liturgical rites of Aquinas’s time. The author observes that this part of the Angelic Doctor’s work has received little attention from theologians and liturgists, largely out of anti-medieval and anti-allegorical prejudices. Quoëx provides a helpful introduction to the genre of the expositio missae, which in the West dates back to the Carolingian period. The heavily allegorizing method of Amalarius of Metz was highly influential on the genre, but other writers, like Florus of Lyons, attempted a more literal approach. The author thinks that Thomas’s most important sources were Albert the Great and William of Middleton, the continuator of Alexander of Hales’s Summa. Aquinas chose to comment on the Mass of the Roman Curia rather than the usages of the Order of Preachers, probably to describe the Latin rite in its most universal form (197).
Quoëx carefully goes through each part of Aquinas’s commentary, laying out the main points and offering his own evaluations. He has a difficult needle to thread in these appendices. On the one hand, he wants to overcome the prejudices that have stood in the way of research on medieval liturgical commentaries and recover the value of the mystagogical approach; on the other hand, he too is critical of excessive allegorizing. His solution is that liturgical commentators need to closely integrate the literal and spiritual senses of the liturgy, which he says that even Thomas sometimes failed to do (167).
Overall, the author is highly favorable to Aquinas’s liturgical theology. He credits him with not only providing a strong doctrinal foundation for the liturgical practice of his time, but also of influencing liturgical concepts and ritual practices after his death. He sees evidence of this influence in the work of the great liturgical commentator William of Durandus (162). Quoëx uses Thomas to counter a later tendency to define the Mass almost uniquely in terms of the act of consecration, to the detriment of the other prayers and rites, which came to be considered as little more than etiquette or decoration. In his view, medieval commentaries provide an antidote to the general anti-ritualism of modernity as well as liturgical minimalism, allowing for “a rediscovery of the liturgy in all the riches of its anthropological, historical, theological, and spiritual dimensions” (261).
The scholarly-historical nature of Quoëx’s work does not prevent it from being closely related to present-day issues in Catholic worship. The author is clearly concerned not only with denial of the cultic dimension of Christianity, but also with the near extinction of the ancient rites of the Latin Church. Quoëx was an expert master of ceremonies who taught liturgy for traditionalist institutes before dying of cancer at the age of thirty-nine, just before Benedict XVI granted wider use of the 1962 Roman Missal. This volumeis also an apology for the classical Latin rites and for the theology of worship that underlay them, though updated with insights from contemporary sources.
The editor and translator Zachary Thomas deserves our thanks for making available in English the contributions of a scholar who passed too swiftly from the scene. Liturgical Theology not only provides a valuable exposition of Aquinas’s thought, but also shows how it may serve as a resource in the twenty-first century.