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"When one believes something to be true because God is Truth itself, one begins to know all the rest in virtue of one’s knowing God. Thereby one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows. For God characteristically knows all that is true by knowing—or rather by being—his own Truth. His knowing of all truth is not, and cannot be, a second act of knowledge resulting from the act by which he knows himself. It is rather because the act by which he knows himself is immediately his knowing of all that is, and of all that can be, that God’s knowledge is Life itself. When it is unrestricted, Life itself is indeed sovereign being, whose nature is intellection and is not determinable by anything else.
"There is a second, significant aspect to this fourth and last reference to divine faith, which, according to its place in the order of the poem, lies just beyond the threshold that separates bare Truth from Truth that is Life. As stated, something in divine faith is already eternal life in us. Faith, however is only its beginning, not its perfection. God’s eternal life becomes definitively and integrally ours only when vision replaces faith, and only when the resurrection allows us to share corporally in blessedness. Only then do we re-join Christ, who, as the incarnate and sacramental God, first joined with us, especially by means of the fullness of sacramental grace that is the Eucharist."
Robert Wielockx, "Poetry and theology in the Adore te deuote: Thomas Aquinas on the Eucharist and Christ's uniqueness," in Christ among the medieval Dominicans: representations of Christ in the texts and images of the Order of Preachers, Notre Dame conferences in medieval studies 7, ed. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 166-167 (157-174), underscoring mine.
"Through the Passion of your Only Begotten Son, O Lord, may our reconciliation with you be near at hand, so that, though we do not merit it by our own deeds, yet by this sacrifice made once for all, we may feel already the effects of your mercy. Through Christ our Lord."
"Per Unigeniti tui passionem placatio tua nobis, Domine, sit propinqua, quam, etsi nostris operibus non meremur, interveniente sacrificio singulari, tua percipiamus miseratione praeventi. Per Christum Dominum nostrum."
Prayer over the Offerings, Palm Sunday, Roman missal. All except for the incipit "Per Unigeniti tui passionem" comes word for word from the 7th-century Leonine (i.e. Veronese) sacramentary (no. 628 in the critical edition of 1956 ed. Mohlberg), which drew upon 5th and 6th century Roman material.
"the reality infinitely
outstrips the figure: the lengthy
germination of wheat and vine [(including, I would add, the fermentation and 'work
of human hands' so indispensable to the transformation of grape and kernel into wine
and (at least leavened) bread)] comes, through transubstantiation, to a head 'in
the mystery of all this bread and all this wine that, across the
immensity of space and time, comes to subsist only [(ne subsistent plus qu')] in the existence of the holy
humanity of Jesus' (H.-M. Feret, "La messe rassembleent de la communauté," in La messe et sa catéchese, p. 275)....
"The
bread and the wine, utilized as figures of the Christian economy, signify the
integration of the [whole] cosmos into the work of restoration. The universe, solidary with [(solidaire
de)] man, had lost its quality of sign; the sin of man had rendered it opaque,
caught up as it was in the Fall. The
consecration of the bread and wine signifies the consecration of all things [in and] through the humanity of Christ; this consecration [(elle)] extends to the [entire] universe and founds the sacramental economy:
the progressive integration of all things into the unity of Christ....
"The death of Christ is a victory that catches up not only humanity, but the universal resurrection. The dogma of the resurrection of the body gives expression to this integral recapture of matter and the universe up into a glorious life".
Dictionnaire de spiritualité,
sv "Eucharistie. I. Mystère eucharistique" (1961), cols. 1579-1581 (1553-1586), by Adalbert Hamman, italics mine.
"When one believes something to be true because God is Truth itself, one begins to know all the rest in virtue of one’s knowing God. Thereby one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows. For God characteristically knows all that is true by knowing—or rather by being—his own Truth. His knowing of all truth is not, and cannot be, a second act of knowledge resulting from the act by which he knows himself. It is rather because the act by which he knows himself is immediately his knowing of all that is, and of all that can be, that God’s knowledge is Life itself. When it is unrestricted, Life itself is indeed sovereign being, whose nature is intellection and is not determinable by anything else.
