Course Description
This course will examine the concept of sacrifice in the Eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas, and subsequent receptions of his teaching in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the sacrificial character of the Eucharist has been of interest to theologians throughout the Church’s history, during the early sixteenth century renewed attention was given to this subject, in part because of disputes that arose between Reformed and Catholic theologians about the relationship between the Eucharistic liturgy and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Does the Eucharistic presence itself have a sacrificial quality? Can aspects of the liturgy or dimensions of the moral life be considered a sacrifice, and if so in what way? Although itself a product of the Middle Ages, as a received text the Summa is in many ways a creature of the early modern period. This course will consider the intersection between Aquinas’s Summa and a selection of its early modern interpreters, including Cajetan, Vitoria and the Salamanca school, the early Jesuits and John of St. Thomas.
Bibliography
REGINALD LYNCH, Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae and Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Early Modern Period, Oxford, 2023.
CHARLES JOURNET, La messe: présence du sacrifice de la croix (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1957). ; The Presence of the Sacrifice of the Cross, 2008.
MARIUS LEPIN, L’Idée du Sacrifice de la Messe d’après les Théologiens depuis l’Origine jusqu’à nos Jours, 3rd ed. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1926.
BERNAHRD BLANKENHORN, Bread from Heaven: An Introduction to the Theology of the Eucharist, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy, Jared Wicks, trans, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1978.