SACRAMENTS OF THE INCARNATE WORD - ETD - University of ...

sacraments related to these). 57 How exactly might or does the Word of God serve as a
decisive precedent for all texts, and “the sacred text” (as Jordan says) in particular? And,
if Aquinas presumed this to be the case, where—in the Summa, for instance—does he
speak about it, and how significant is the point for a proper understanding of his larger
achievement?
Joseph Wawrykow’s essay on “Wisdom in the Christology of Thomas Aquinas”
charts a useful course for the address of such questions, building on Jordan, but “not at
the expense of the ideas that Thomas expresses about the Word who becomes
incarnate.” 58 For our purposes, three preliminary lessons may be culled from
Wawrykow’s essay. First, Wawrykow notes Thomas’s systematic and orderly handling of
the Word in the Summa: that the discussion of the redemptive Word in the tertia pars
builds upon the treatment of the creative Word in the prima. The Word, as “the eternal
concept of God, ... stands as the exemplar (likeness) of all creatures,” and so is fittingly
the incarnated actor who should, by the power of the Father, initiate the “second
57 The only focused handling of sacraments that I have found in Jordan’s work is his brief study of
sacramental causality in ST III 60-65 in “Philosophy in a Summa of Theology,” Rewritten Theology, pp.
163-68, in service of the formal point that Thomas “converts philosophy into theology” (p. 168). I know of
no treatment of God as Trinity or of Jesus Christ in Jordan’s writings on Aquinas (or Augustine).
58 Wawrykow, “Wisdom in the Christology of Thomas Aquinas,” p. 175. Wawrykow does not in
his essay criticize Jordan; I am drawing the contrastive point for my own purposes. Wawrykow adverts
positively to Jordan’s work by citing two of his essays in the first footnote, in evidence of the claim that
“readers of Aquinas are increasingly... more attentive to the ways in which what might be called Thomas’s
literary decisions have shaped and promoted his thought” (p. 175). The essays are “The Alleged
Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas” (1992) and “The Competition of Authoritative Languages and
Aquinas’s Theological Rhetoric” (1994), both of which appear in revised form in Rewritten Theology, as
chs. 4 and 2, respectively.
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