Catherine Pickstock’s contribution to the aforementioned volume on Paul explores the relation of worship ad the senses. She begins with the Pascalian observation that human beings are between beasts and angels, but rather than seeing this as a tragic failure of human nature, Pickstock rightly sees it as humanity’s glory: “Unlike angels, we combine in our persons every level of the created order from the inorganic, through the organic, through the animally psychic to the angelically intellectual.”

Humanity’s status as microcosm means that we have “privileged access to the mute language of physical reality.” Angels don’t; they’re not physical. Animals don’t; they lack language. Physical signification is a uniquely and essentially human capacity among creatures.

And this means in turn that in and to human beings there is revealed “something of God hidden even from the angels themselves.” Specifically, “the dumb simplicity and lack of reflexivity in physical things, or the spontaneity of animals, show to us aspects of divine simplicity and spontaneity itself, which cannot be evident to the somewhat reflective, discursive, and abstracting operation of limited human or angelic minds.” As a result, sacraments are not merely metaphorical but heuristic, possessing the ability “to prompt us to new thought and guide us into deeper modes of meditation because they contain a surplus that thought can never fully imagine.”

Worship between beasts and angels must thus be sacramental.

One other note: Late in her essay, in a discussion of the “interior”and “external” senses discussed in both Scripture (“eyes of the heart”) and in the Christian tradition, Pickstock insists that these two senses are always integrated. It’s not as if exterior sensation “cues” us to an interior, purely mental sense. Rather, we cannot sense at all without experiencing inner sense: “from the outset we relate one mode of sensation to another. Clearly our seeing dark trees against the far background of the setting sun is deeply affected by our awareness that we can touch the one and not the other. And were it not for our sense of hearing, we would never be able to see the organ in the church as an organ, a musical instrument, at all.” It is only because we both sense something with our eyes and “simultaneously imagine and grasp it to some degree with our minds” that we experience sensations at all.