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Aspects of the Chalice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Dominic Baldwin O.P.
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Extract

Though a study of the liturgy is undertaken to find the meaning of, to get behind, so to speak, the elements (the words, actions, things) of the Church's ceremonies, it may seem a little strange that we should look for a symbolical meaning of necessary a receptacle as a chalice or cup in any religious rite in which a liquid is used. But man's knowledge begins with the senses. Metaphors, sensible (corporeal) representaons or similitudes are not only natural to man but naturally pleasing to him—for which reason St Thomas says, it is fitting that pmtual things are given to us by means of metaphors drawn from corporeal things, sub metaphoris corporalium.

Man has always tended to express his religious or spiritual ideas in terms of his physical environment and his reactions to it, in terms of things that are vital and familiar to him. Though this anniiarity has perhaps clouded the modern sophisticated mind, the Principle remains fundamentally true.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 6 , Issue 62-63 , September 1951 , pp. 51 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © 1951 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Summa Theol. I, I, 9 c and ad 1.

2 Victor White, O.P.: The Frontiers of Theology and Psychology. (Guild of Pastoral Psychology Guild Lecture No. 19, October 1942, p. 12.)

3 Summa Theol. Ill, 83, 3.

4 Summa Theol ID, 78, 3 ad 1.

5 Jesus and his Sacrifice, p. 98.

6 Summa Theol. III, 51, 1.

7 Jastrow: Babylonian and Assyrian Religion, p. 571-3.

8 Deliztch: Babel and Bible, p. 58.

9 Hastings: Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. IV, p. 870b.

10 Cook: Early Religion of Palestine in the Light of Archeology.

11 Garstang: The Hittite Empire, p. 124, p. 149; also Burrows in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1925, p. 284.

12 Cooke: North Semitic Inscriptions, p. 162; see also Schofield: Archeology and the After Life.

13 Albright: Archeology and the Religion of Palestine, p. 128.

14 Psalms quoted from P. Callan, O.P.: The Psalms.

15 Skinner: Commentary on Isaias (Cambridge); also Oxford Hebrew Lexicon.

16 We find something corresponding to this in various religious rites of Spring festivities in which an image of a god is hidden and found again—as symbolising new life—and in the old myths and ‘fairy’ tales in which a hero seeks a lost (buried) treasure. The treasure signifies wealth and prosperity—new life. To obtain the treasure the hero must undergo many hardships, he must fight a dragon or some monster that guards the treasure, or beguile the snake-guardian.

17 S. H. Hooke: Myth and Ritual, p. 151.