Foundational Theological Views o

Many years ago an English parish priest said to me that it was impossible to read the work of the English Cardinal Manning on the priesthood without being made totally fearful. That needs a completion. That we need to have the grace to achieve a reverential fear, given the notion and the universal scope of the subject matter, but also to achieve an intimate ease in its exercise.

That being said, this first conference will be taken up with offering a reflective comparison of the view of the priesthood given in the Vatican Council document with the views given by Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the second conference I will bring some reflections together on the consequences of the perception, found in the Greek fathers, but also in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, of the thesis that the ultimate end of the adoption into divine sonship is „deification“, and the consequences for priestly pastoral care with that purpose in view. It is clearly a proposition that needs to be handled with particular care, especially to avoid the accusation of its being seen as a form of pantheism. Actually as a culmination of the reality of adoption into divine Sonship, which made of Christ the first of many brothers, it cannot be the kind of un-supernatural pantheism which was attributed to the so-called German idealists at the turn of the 18th to the19th century. The interest both experiential and historical in deification was stirred by the Spanish Dominican, Padre Juan Gonlalez Arintero, who died in 1928, in his La evolucion mistica, which was the third volume of a long work entitled Desenvolvimiento y vitalidad de la Iglesia (translated by Jordan Aumann O.P. as The mystical evolution in the development and vitality of the Church (2 vols. St Louis 1950-51)). Two citations from Saint Thomas Aquinas (at §460) and Saint Gregory Nazienzen (§1589) with this theme are to be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (English version) (London 1994)

I a) The Perspectives of the Vatican Council decree “Presbyterorum Ordinis”

This ordered and structured document has a relation to priestly experience whose references fall more from the practical and current questions of the time of its publication than from theological considerations. To remain so with a continuing insight on experience from within experience, and yet to bring this into an ordered form, was a considerable achievement, and displays well the wisdom of the collective episcopate and those who guided their deliberations. In all human handling the important question is to find the right relationship between the material which is handled, which in this material is both empirical and supernaturally revealed, with the principles deriving from higher and objective insights with the living harmony present within the deposit of faith, of things which are both “old” and “newly emerging” in consistency with these, by submission to the interior guidance of the Holy Spirit.[1]

So in the first chapter on the Council Document on “The Priesthood in the Mission of the Church” there is a reminder that each Mass as offered is offered for the whole Church: “Through the hands of the priests and in the name of the whole Church, the Lord’s sacrifice is offered in an unbloody and sacramental manner until He himself returns” (2). And their work is consummated in the glory of God: “The purpose, therefore, which priests pursue by their ministry and life is the glory of God the Father as it will be achieved in Christ” (ib.). Their life is a balance of heavenly gain and solidarity with other men: “They cannot be ministers of Christ unless they are witnesses and dispensers of a life other than this earthly one. But they cannot be of service to men if they remain strangers to the life and conditions of men”, and this latter concern entails that “they seek to lead those who are not of this sheepfold” into his “one fold” (3). Here also the “ministry of the Word” draws men to participate in the offering of the blood of Christ and in the celebration of the other sacraments, and where “the most blessed Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth”, and where “he offers life to men” (4). Practical advice is given on how priests can increase the understanding of the Eucharist, leading to an ”ever improved spirit of prayer” (5).

The section on the priestly call to perfection begins and ends with positioning the priest as co-operators with the Bishops, and stresses the need of solidarity together with other priests in their task (12-14). The Mysteries which they celebrate become objects for imitation whose force is communicated to those whom “they guide and nourish”. That will help them to be realistic about their flocks, who are all subjected to “a great diversity of problems”. The weight of problems which they encounter should lead to a spirit of cooperation with Bishops and with other priests, and an apostolic selflessness in putting themselves at the service of more than human energies and wisdom. Putting themselves at the service of those who make up the hierarchical structure of the Church is an entry to “a more mature freedom” (15). This is the place for a discussion of the positive values of celibacy (16). “Friendly and fraternal dealings among themselves and other men rises into a “liberty which frees them from excessive concern and makes them docile to the divine voice” (17). The management of the goods which belong to the Church leads to a consideration of the means for the support of priestly life (18) This outward-looking leads to the awareness of the need aptly and uninterruptedly to “develop their knowledge of divine and human affairs” which come together in the context of pastoral studies, brought together in an enlightened way within a theological context which has an overflow onto personal spirituality (19). The question of financing is placed in the context which extends back to the community of goods in the early Church (20-21).

Most of the practical linkages within this programme will be through the way in which individual priests relate themselves to a wide spectrum and apostolic and practical duties. But the final section (22) gives a spiritual context which contains the whole: “all priests cooperate in carrying out the saving plan of God. This plan is the mystery of Christ, the sacrament hidden from the ages in God. It is brought to fulfilment only by degrees, through the collaboration of many ministries in the upbuilding of Christ’s Body until the full measure of his manhood is achieved. Since all of these realities are hidden with Christ in God they can be best grasped by faith.”

The thought of Saint Thomas on the priesthood derives from a Greek text, passed to the Latin west, translated twice into Latin in the ninth century, and with two improved translations made just before and just after 1200 – at the time when Latin translations were appearing from Greek and Arabic versions of Aristotle. He had given himself the name of “Dionysius”[2] as the author of an important series of writings in Greek, though he may have come from Syria. In the Greek east Mediterranean areas there were further pagan developments of a synthesis of Platonist with Aristotelian thought, conventionally known as “neo-Platonism”. At the end of the fifth century or the beginning of the sixth “Dionysius” had made a reworking of part of a text of Proclus, entitled The Theology of Plato, which he had entitled On the Divine Names. He gave an Aristotelian and empirical interpretation to that text despite its Platonism. He also wrote two independent but conjoined works, on the hierarchy of the Angels and the hierarchy of the Church. With that pairing of the two works, the work on the Ecclesiastical hierarchy provides the substance and the context of the thought of Saint Thomas on the priesthood, and of the whole of the sacrament of “Holy Order”. Most important for the emergence of Thomas’s thought as different from that of his master at Paris, Saint Albert the Great, was the latter’s course interpreting On the Divine Names. When a fellow student became aware of the power of Thomas’s thinking, after judging his normal silence as a sign of stupidity, Albert’s prophetic comment that this “dumb ox” would “soon fill the world with his bellowing”, has become widely known. Thomas was appointed to write out the fair copy of Albert’s lecture course (which I have handled myself at the Italian National Library at Naples).

Thomas takes over Dionysius’s conception that there are three functions which operate in each of the two hierarchies, which are purgation, illumination and perfecting. Purgation, that is from “uncleanness of the mind” (“a sordibus mentis”: Super Sent., lib. 4 d. 5 q. 1 a. 2 arg. 5), is considered as a necessary primary process, to be followed by illumination, and the process to be concluded by the establishment of what is subjected to the process of a state of perfection.. By extension it is the harmonisation of the preceding two states. Illumination as deriving ultimately from God seems to be the most frequently mentioned. The difference between the functioning of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the celestial, angelic hierarchy reflects the “derivation” of the ecclesiastical from the celestial, and its “imitation” (ST I 106, 3, arg 1 and ad 1); their difference so that the same functions which are found distributed amongst purgative, illuminative and perfecting in the ecclesiastical hierarchy are all found together in the angelic and celestial, though they may be found with a greater or a lesser relative power: all of the latter, with their grouping of powers together will vary as wholes according to their nearness or distance from God (ib.). In the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the order of deacons is purgative, that of priests is illuminative, and that of bishops is perfective … but each angel purges, illumines and perfects” (ST I 108 2 arg 3 and ad 3). “Hence a minor angel of the celestial hierarchy can not only purge but illuminate and perfect, and in a higher mode than the orders of our hierarchy” (ib ad 3).

Citing Dionysius in his earlier work on the Sentences of the Parisian Bishop Peter Lombard – a theologically ordered collection of texts, of which the majority are from Saint Augustine, he relates the working of the ecclesiastical hierarchical actions to the celebration of the sacraments. He gives an example of the celebration of baptism, which shows how the action of baptising works in different modes: “[Dionysius] calls the sacred actions hierarchical actions, which are purging, illuminating and perfecting, which in our hierarchy consist principally in the dispensing of the sacraments, and these actions are passed on under a precept, the principle one being baptism being as their doorway. It has the aspect of being a cause, by impressing a character and conferring grace by which a man is given a form and made fit to receive the other sacraments. In relationship to this he says that it is by character and by grace formative of living habits, i.e. as an element of the soul which gives it a facility for the fitting reception of divine utterances of the doctrine of the faith, as also of the sacred actions which confer other sacraments, “which must not be conferred on the non-baptised” (Super Sent., lib. 4 d. 3 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 3 co.). He brings together the sacramental actions with an unlimited entry into the science of God, which he calls “showing the people how they can be led to the intelligible realities of God” (de Veritate, q. 9 a. 1 co.) Here, he gives the priest’s function of celebrating the Eucharist as the highest form of illumination: “to purge is proper to deacons, to illuminate belongs to priests and this consists most of all in celebrating the Eucharist, to perfect belongs to Bishops” (Quodlibet XI, q. 7 co), and he sees here the action of the Bishop in conferring orders, in consecrating virgins and vessels, and in conferring confirmation. In all of these details we see that Thomas retains a strong sense of the modelling of the ecclesiastical hierarchy on that of the angels, and that he sees enfolded in the details of different actions within single and intense powers of purging and illuminating (because “no sacrament of the new law purges without the infusion of grace, which is to say illumination” (Super Sent., lib. 4 d. 2 q. 1 a. 2 co.).

By comparison with this Thomas sees the angelical activity as always active, and even though each angel has a participation of all three actions, the relationship between higher and lower angels is such that there can always be instruction of the lower:”They purge by removing ignorance; they illumine by strengthening the intellect of the lower with their own light; they perfect by leading them to a higher knowledge” (Compendium theologiae, lib. 1 cap. 126 co.).

Being higher creatures, they are living by participating to differing degrees in the hierarchical actions of God as principle authority in a multiple action which is continual and progressive – not according to our experience of subjection to time, because they subject time to themselves. So we can conceive of two harmoniously joined hierarchies of sources with analogous ranges of action: always to sustain the supernatural good, and with it the natural good in the cosmos, both containing their spheres within themselves. Modelled on the higher instructive function of the lower angels by the higher angels, the more dilated ecclesiastical hierarchy initiates acts under God which are to raise themselves and all men into the Mystery of Christ, which is truly a Mystery of Mysteries. It regards the priest as a “mystagogue”: one who introduces men into the mysteries of faith in their reality, not their abstract reconstructions.

You may find this conception strange, unfashionable, and you might be tempted to think that this is eastern and does not fit in well with the ethos of the Western Latin Church. So to conclude this part of the recollection and to anticipate what will follow, I ask you to consider these two texts.

“Those who are involved in the construction [of the Church] will be given Christ, the source of peace for all men, as a reward from God our Saviour and a gift from heaven, through whom we have access in one Spirit to the Father. … That is why it is said that peace will be given to everyone helping with the building. Whether a man is building the Church because he is set over God’s house as a spiritual teacher, that is to say an interpreter of the sacred mysteries, or whether he is acting for the good of his own soul improving himself as a living and spiritual stone, fit to be built into a holy temple, a spiritual house of God, such a man will certainly be given the gift of saving his soul without any great difficulty.”

And the second text is much shorter, and condenses so much: “There, the Lord’s chalice is drunk whenever holy charity is preserved. Without this a man could give up his body to be burned and it would not help him. But through the gift of love we receive the grace to be in reality what we celebrate mystically in the sacrifice.” That is, a man divinised by being transformed into the Son of God in human flesh, in the act of offering himself for all the divine intentions for the world gathered into one act.

You should know those texts because you read them both in your breviary office about a month ago!

The first one is by Saint Cyril of Alexandria and was the second reading for the Office of Readings for the 28^th Sunday; the second was a text from a Latin Bishop, Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe, and was the second reading for the following Monday. “Spiritual teacher” in the first translates “mystagogue” from the Greek, and in the second Saint Fulgentius had no scruple about using a term which placed the thought in what we might have considered a language proper to the Greeks. And the Church has given us these two texts in our Vernacular, Latin-based breviaries. So we must expand our minds to accept them with their full value. Once we open ourselves into this ethos we find that the harmony of the unity of faith will so expand itself in us to accept a wider and higher horizon from which our hold may have been slipping: a higher horizon which brings its spiritual gifts and encouragements which are so much more powerful and beautiful than an inferior moralising.

For the second conference I shall expand this context, with the thought that the corresponding mystagogy will find a place for the reality of “deification”. It was a thought found in Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. Here the thought of the Spanish Dominican Father Arintero, who has brought this theme to light in a spiritual and scholarly way. To which I add that it created an enthusiasm in the American Dominican. Father Jordan Aumann to translate it into English as The Mystical Evolution, even as a paperback, where its earliest pages are relevant, and it is on sale as new and as second-hand at really rock-bottom prices. It was a work given to me to read by the Novice-Master’s socius in 1953, though taken away at a Provincial’s visitation – as being too advanced for a novice to read.

II An anticipation of a hieratic pastoral action at a higher, though forgotten mode, which is spiritually realistic, biblically derivable and in a tradition common to Latin as well as Orthodox

We come to this theme under the auspicious patronage of the conception of Saint Cyril of Alexandria of the priest as “mystagogue”, initiating men into the divine mysteries, and the Latin Saint Fulgentius seeing a Christian becoming mystically identified through the gift of love with the Son of God become man in the mystery of Christ in a timeless identity with his “death, resurrection and ascension” and awaiting his return to this earth.

Of this identity with Christ, Thomas has an interesting passage of commentary on the well-known passage from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (4,4-5): “when the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject to the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons”. “Therefore because Christ as man being uniquely engendered from the Father in the highest fullness of grace, it overflowed in consequence on others, so that as the Son of God, made man, he might make men Gods and sons of Gods, as was written by the Apostle in Galatians 4,4” (Compendium theologiae, lib. 1 ch. 214 co). The usual biblical derivation of this conception is from the second Epistle of Peter (1,4): “That you might become sharers of the divine nature”. But the word for “sharers” is in Greek “koinonia”, and “koinon” is a common nature, as we share humanity together. So we share the nature of Christ, as the “first-born among many brothers” (Rom 8,29). And though I have translated the word here as “sharers”, among all the English translations, out of respect for the force of that word “koinonia”, there is virtual unanimity in using “partakers” or “participants”. Thomas alludes to that participation in another text: “A creature having reason is said to be deified, through the fact that, in his own way, he is united to God; for deity belongs principally to God himself, but in a secondary and participative way to those who are deified” (In de Divinis Nominibus ch.1, lect 2).

So, in his General Audience on 10 June 2009, when the subject of his discourse was the Irish Scholar, John Scotus Eriguena, who worked at the court of the Carolingian Emperors, the Holy Father mentioned him as writing on the theme of “theosis” – deification, he was reminding us all of the existence of this conception, once very current to east and west, and not quite forgotten in the accumulation of other theological materials, especially over the last two centuries. His words were:

“This arduous, demanding and exciting journey, that consists of continuous achievements and the relativization of human knowledge, leads the intelligent creature to the threshold of the divine Mystery where all notions admit of their own weakness and inability and thus, with the simple free and sweet power of the truth, make it obligatory ceaselessly to surpass all that is progressively achieved. Worshipful and silent recognition of the Mystery which flows into unifying communion is therefore revealed as the only path to a relationship with the truth that is at the same time the most intimate possible and the most scrupulously respectful of otherness. John Scotus, here too using terminology dear to the Christian tradition of the Greek language, called this experience for which we strive "theosis", or divinization, with such daring affirmations that he might be suspected of heterodox pantheism. Yet, even today one cannot but be strongly moved by texts such as the following in which with recourse to the ancient metaphor of the smelting of iron he writes: ‘just as all red-hot iron is liquified to the point that it seems nothing but fire and yet the substances remain distinct from one another, so it must be accepted that after the end of this world all nature, both the corporeal and the incorporeal, will show forth God alone and yet remain integral so that God can in a certain way be com-prehended while remaining in-comprehensible and that the creature itself may be transformed, with ineffable wonder, and reunited with God’" (v. PL 122, col. 451 B).

Benedict mentions the reflections on theosis – divinising – which can be found among the Greek Fathers. The greatest of them was Gregory of Nazienzen. If you have any doubts about the normality of this teaching, you should note the quotation given in the Catechism of the Catholic Church from his second Oration precisely in the matter of the priesthood (§1589). “Before the grandeur of the priestly grace and office, the holy doctors felt an urgent call to conversion in order to conform their whole lives to him whose sacrament had made them ministers. Thus Saint Gregory of Nazienzen, as a very young priest exclaimed: “We must begin by purifying ourselves before purifying others, we must be instructed to be able to instruct, become lights to illuminate, draw close to God to bring him close to others, be sanctified to sanctify, lead by the hand and counsel prudently. I know whose ministers we are, where we find ourselves and to where we strive. I know God’s greatness and man’s weakness and also his potential. [Who then is the priest? He is] the defender of truth, who stands with angels, gives glory with archangels, causes sacrifices to rise to the altar on high, shares Christ’s priesthood, refashions creation, restores it in God’s image, recreates it for the world on high, and, even greater, is divinised and divinises” (Oratio II, 71, 74, 73 (PG 35, 480-1)). That is a composite quotation. By a fortunate chance I quoted a passage from the third of the places mentioned with an even more striking expression: that “it is the privileged function of a priest ‘to be a God and to make Gods of men’” (§73).[3]

In that paper, given at Oxford, in a Patristic Conference, I quoted from later on in the same Oration. It should be noted that these “Orations” which were often very long, were heard by large audiences, many perhaps most of whom were technically illiterate, but were none the less ready to discuss their content afterwards. I will allow myself to quote most of the passage of the paper which I gave twenty-six years ago as it is all relevant to the joint theme of priesthood and the details of deification as he saw it.

“He speaks of the Eucharistic sacrifice as an entrance into the heavenly sanctuary mysterically made present. Some remarks on the nature of preaching, and of the need to be made fit to pass on a pure teaching are of particular relevance to our theme, “… before preparing mouth, lips and tongue, before the mouth is open and has drawn down the Spirit or has been dilated by and filled by the Spirit for the exposition of mysteries and dogmas, before the lips have been bound by the sentiments of God so that they may speak with wisdom” (ib. §95). Such mysteries constitute an object other than the objects of reason; their discernment is through a power other than that of reason: even if reason’s ingenuity is used in expressing them to oneself and to others. Though the mysteries are in some way multiple, their expression is given a unification and an ordering in the gifts of divine insight and divine utterance. Their reality is known to the preacher, and he is self-consciously aware of his awareness. It is also known to the recipients, who just as self-consciously will relate his words to the reality which is also accessible in their own experience. The process of passing them on is also a self-conscious one. What is not in view is the reduction of the mysteries to a thought expressing their essence, and even more certainly not as part of a necessary historical-logical process. Though thought may not be annulled by this commerce, it must treat these mysteries with reverence; and they must be acknowledged as an ‘other’. The appropriate place for their exposition is a Church rather than a study or lecture-room, for the exposition of the holy things of God is a privileged activity, in which preacher and listener are both subject to a divine initiative. Whilst aware of the presence of a divine commerce present in all thinking, Fathers like Gregory and also Augustine were aware of the possibility of an intellectuality with what was in fact salvation, but without this sanctification … . Gregory went on, “Who is the man who will take on this risky task without having his heart first burnt by the words of God, pure and tested by fire, whilst the Scriptures were explained to him, without having inscribed words three times on the tablet of his heart, and in such a way as to possess the Spirit of Christ, without having penetrated the treasures of darknesses hidden from the crowd and invisible, so that they may recognise the richness they contain, and create riches in expressing spiritual realities to spiritual people” (ib. §96 – in fact citing 1 Cor 2,13).°

The text and notes of Father Arintero’s Mystical Evolution contain numerous citations of Fathers, Greek and Latin, and also later theologians, on deification, but no text seems to reach the essence of the matter as profoundly and as personally as the second Oration of Saint Gregory of Nazienzen.

He performs the service of placing them in a theological setting, and notably by his assertion along with other theologians that the work is “truly proper” to the Holy Spirit, not appropriated to him (transl p.36). His work is not only historical and in a higher sense than merely encyclopaedic, but it is experiential, bearing the mark of an experience of the reality in himself and as discerned in others. So it can not be only a question of taking over a doctrine in order to give it the prominence which is due to it. Those who undertake the spiritual direction of others cannot merely adopt for themselves an abstract teaching about what is a living reality in the highest sense. It demands experience and discernment, a higher prudence; it is not just in itself a good thing which can be taught without a sensitivity to the spiritual gifts of the learner – and this whether in the class-room or privately. He uses the image of Saint Teresa finding in the emergence of the silk-worm from its cocoon, now possessing organs suitable for life in the more rarefied atmosphere, and able to feed on the nectar of flowers” (Myst.Ev. transl. pp.22-23). “Then the soul perceives and understands that not only does it work with the power of Christ, but that it has become entirely like Jesus Christ – having died and risen with him and received the perfect impress of His living Seal – and that He Himself works and lives in it and through it and with it. Now in all truth the soul can say: ‘I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me,’ for the life of the soul is Christ Himself, whose Spirit animates it completely and reigns therein with absolute sovereignty” (p.23). So he explains the reality of that transformation of what was like a cocoon to a silkworm in Saint Teresa’s comparison, as the soul “enters fully into the mystical life, without fear of having to return to the ordinary practices of the ascetical life each time the impulse and sweet inspiration of the Spirit ceases.

He breathes where he wills and when he wills, and the soul does not usually know whither he goes; in spite of this fact, by his gentle breathing He carries it under full sail to safe port. When that breathing ceases, the soul must navigate by means of oars at the risk of being held back by the waves. But as the soul begins to enter upon the high sea, the perpetual and tranquil currents of the ocean of living water are observed and the impulses and inspiration are more and more ceaseless. Then the ‘current of the river of grace gladdens the city of God’ and the breath of the Holy Ghost now shows whence he comes and whither he is leading the soul.

Then follows the prodigious working of grace, which is realized in great part during the night of the senses. During this period, grace subjects the senses to right reason illumined by Christian prudence. It likewise ensures the practice of the supernatural virtues, uniting the soul to God in perfect conformity of will and disposing it to follow his promptings, which gradually become more and more constant. Yet the operation of grace is realized still well in the night of the spirit, wherein the supernaturalized reason is subjected to the supreme and uniquely infallible norm of almost total direction by the divine Consoler. It is then that the soul ‘in darkness and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised’ experiences a renewal or metamorphosis which enables it to pass from the simple conforming union in which there yet remained, to some extent, its own proper initiative and direction, to the transforming union in which God becomes ‘all things in all’, the sole director and ordinary guide of its life” (Myst.Ev. p.22).

That is the account of Father Arintero. It touches on the profoundest movements of the human spirit by the Spirit of God by which, in a unity difficult for one without experience to conceive, the soul rises inseparable now from God to whom it has found a way, from divine instruction, to realise more fully the spiritual potentialities which it has received and to enjoy a corresponding spiritual liberty.

The priest should thank God if he has the privilege of meeting someone in whom something of this movement can be discerned. The advice of Saint Francis of Sales should be taken as a guide where he is unsure of what say, that ‘you can catch more flies with a teaspoon of honey than with a barrel of vinegar.’ If we include our own experience which of us will not say that the rehearsal of perplexities with a person whom we identified immediately as having a sympathy for us: not dominating, not weak, without curiosity, one who seems a spiritual friend: an other myself, that the rehearsal of them and the consequent putting of the thoughts into order has achieved something which we could not achieve by ourselves.. But above all, we ourselves should wait on the divine movement to express ourselves modestly and objectively, with the highest charity to those we look for our help. For our power of purging and illuminating is an indispensable factor in bringing out from their depths the spiritual qualities of those who will form a spiritual élite. How they have come so far and how they have come to us need not concern us, for in his infinite wisdom God uses sometimes unusual and yet, we have to admit with admiration, appropriate ways to further his purposes, which always contain the good of ourselves and the good of the Mystical Body of the Church: totally in each one of us, as Saint Peter Damien so strikingly taught, and to which Benedict XVI referred to in his General Audience address of 9 September of this year: "Christ's Church", Saint Peter wrote, “is united by the bond of charity to the point that just as she has many members so is she, mystically, entirely contained in a single member; in such a way that the whole universal Church is rightly called the one Bride of Christ in the singular, and each chosen soul, through the sacramental mystery, is considered fully the Church [pienamente Chiesa]" (Letter 28).

[1] With Saint Thomas, not only the first question of Summa Theologiae I, but also the introduction to his writing (hardly a commentary, but its vast material provided for the needs of „Sententialists“) of his longer writing on the Sententiae of Bishop Peter Lombard, introduced both works as the compositions of a structured, scientific theology.

[2] As there is a copy in the Landekot library, the more hardy among you may be interested to read the section on „pseudo-Dionysius“ in my Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology (pp.76-80).

[3] In a contribution to the Oxford Patristic Conference of 1983: „Hegel and the Intellectuality of the Fathers“. v. Studia Patristica Vol. XVIII,4 (Kalamazoo and Leuven 1990 pp.322-7.). It made a truly theological contrast with the thought of Hegel, who, abandoning a mysteric setting, reduced Christian theology to that of purest intellectuality.