Economic Analogies for the Sacraments in the Middle Ages
What I've Been Working On
Longtime readers of Window Light know that every once in a while, I offer paid subscribers a preview of projects I’ve been working on (such as here and here). Today I want to highlight an essay of mine from the recently published volume Markets and Other Social Structures: Analyzing Moral Ecologies in Christian Ethics, edited by David Cloutier, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, and Christine McRorie, a professor of theology at Boston College. The volume is a collection of essays in honor of Daniel Finn, who has taught both theology and economics for many years at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and who is a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Writing on how the Christian moral tradition can inform economic ethics and how theologians can learn from economics, Finn, throughout his career, has embodied Pope Francis’s call for Catholic theology to be “transdisciplinary.”
Other contributors to the volume include Christine Firer Hinze, a professor of theology at Fordham University and also a former president of the CTSA, the Italian economist Stefano Zamagni, who contributed to the writing of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, and Fr. James Heft, SM, the founder and former president of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, among several others.
My own contribution, “Economic Analogies for the Sacraments in the Middle Ages,” revisits an important medieval debate over the nature of the sacraments. By the twelfth century, theologians had largely agreed that the sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, that is, they both symbolically represent God’s transformation of the believer, but in some sense also cause that transformation, even if God is its primary cause. But this consensus raised the further question of how the sacraments are efficacious.
By the second half of the thirteenth century, two main camps had developed. On the one hand, some argued that the sacraments become efficacious through God’s decree, issued as part of the covenant made between Christ and the Church. The Dominicans Richard Fishacre and Robert Kilwardby and the great Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure were early supporters of this view, and William of Ockham, Robert Holcot, and Pierre d’Ailly revived this theory in the fourteenth century. The second theory, associated especially with the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas, instead proposes that the sacraments serve as instruments through which God carries out His activity. After considering both sides, my own conclusion in the essay is that the fourteenth-century Franciscan John Duns Scotus provides an able defense of a moderate version of what you could call the covenant theory while raising damaging criticisms of Aquinas’s instrumental theory.
Perhaps more interestingly, however, my essay explores how both sides in this debate used analogies drawn from medieval economic life to explain and defend their sacramental theology. Contrary to Pope Francis, perhaps “transdisciplinary” theology does not represent a totally new paradigm! Indeed, the use of economic analogies to describe theological ideas is a venerable tradition; Jesus himself describes sin as a “debt” in the Lord’s Prayer (Mt. 6:12) and likewise uses economic metaphors in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Mt. 20:1-16) and the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30), among others.
