The Sacramental Approach to the Sacred in Thomistic Perspective

The main challenge of theology is the adequate manner of the transmission of what is sacred and belongs to the transcendent order by means of appropriate categories of immanent religious language. In history, there was a debate between the univocal and equivocal approach, but the main Christian rules of telling about the sacred were shaped by Thomas Aquinas, who proposed analogy as a fundamental tool: in the middle of similarity there is still great dissimilarity. From this perspective, the world is seen as sacramental, so all material reality refers to something more and further. In this way, the sacred has a transitory character. Nowadays, however, the naturalistic narrative dominates among many theories of the sacred. This paper will begin by dealing with several types of theological narrations about the sacred in Christian theology (metaphysical and historical, mediating and representative, etc.). Then it will go into characterizing the Thomistic storytelling and its hermeneutical rules. Finally, it will consider the role of imagination in transmitting the sacred (Chesterton, Lewis, McGrath) and how the new perception of the sacred—so visible in pilgrimages such as Camino de Santiago—can be integrated in a new thinking about the city of the future.