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Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas Lash
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The Aquinas Lecture given at Blackfriars, Cambridge on 29 January 1990.

1. Telling the time

By current standards, St Thomas Aquinas did not have very much to say about time, and even less to say about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. When discussing the commandments, however, he did say something rather interesting about the Sabbath. Human beings, he tells us, owe a threefold duty to the head of their community: a duty of faithfulness or single-hearted loyalty, of reverence, and of service. This threefold duty is, according to St Thomas, the subject-matter of the commands to worship only God, to refrain from taking his name in vain, and to keep the sabbath holy. It is, he says, the servant’s duty to repay through service the good things received from his lord. But what we have received from this Lord, the Creator, is—everything. Hence the command to sanctify the sabbath in grateful remembrance of the creation of the world: ‘sanctifica(re) sabbat(um) in memoriam creationis rerum’. In due course, I shall return to this suggestion that it is in keeping our very createdness in mind that we keep the Sabbath holy. But, first, I want to reflect on what is entailed in learning how to pray.

But surely, you may say, we know how to pray? Jesus taught us how to pray: he taught us to say ‘Our Father ...’.

But do we really know how to say ‘Our Father’ here and now, in this place, at this time?

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 71 , Issue 836 , March 1990 , pp. 109 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 I am tempted to immediate distraction by the thought that, in celebrating St Thomas and his Order, we are also celebrating the fact that the Dominicans, from the outset and of set purpose, established patterns of social relationship subversive of just such feudal structures of dependence!

2 Summa Theologiae, Ia Hae, 100.5.c.

3 See Jossua, Jean‐Pierre, La Foi en Questions (Paris, Flammarion, 1989), p. 134Google Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. I. Power, Property and the State (London, Macmillan, 1981), p. 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Craig, Edward, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 282ffGoogle Scholar.

5 Steiner, George, Real Presences. Is there anything in what we say? (London, Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 51–134Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 148.

7 See ibid., pp. 133–134.

8 Ibid., p. 3.

9 Ibid., pp. 231–232.

10 Ibid., p. 137.

11 In view of the extensive ancient and medieval literature and iconography on ‘the harrowing of hell’ it was, perhaps, imprudent of Steiner to say that ‘neither historical record nor myth nor Scripture make report’ (ibid., p. 231, emphasis added) concerning this Saturday.

12 Moltmann, Jiirgen, Creating a Just Future (London, SCM Press, 1989), p. 81Google Scholar.

13 See ibid., p. 85.

14 See my discussion of these things, with Buber's help, in Easter in Ordinary (London, SCM Press, 1988), pp. 210–212Google Scholar.

15 Real Presences, p. 147.

16 Ibid., pp. 176, 147–148.

17 This is beautifully brought out by Gustavo Gutierrez, in On Job. God‐Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, tr. O'Connell, Matthew J. (New York, Orbis Books, 1987)Google Scholar.

18 Sölle, Dorothee, ‘God's Pain and our Pain’, in 'The Future of Liberation Theology, Essays in Honor of Gustavo Gutierrez, ed. Ellis, Marc H. and Maduro, Otto (New York, Orbis Books, 1989), pp. 326–333Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 330.