As mentioned in my earlier blog, Joseph Ratzinger took great pains to explain the need for the sacraments and the desire for us to encounter Christ in these ways in Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence. It is through the sacraments that Our Lord desires to meet us and for us to enter into His history. As Ratzinger puts it, “to receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ…that opens up to man the historical context that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness—into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163). Therefore, the sacraments are not simply pleasant rites of passage, but the real entrance of ourselves into God’s history with mankind.
Louis Bouyer in his work, Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, reiterates these ideas and implies an extension of them by not only pointing out that the sacraments are how Christ desires to be reunited with His Creation, but are, in fact, the proper and most suitable way in which this restoration is to occur. The sacraments are the very way we enter into, or assimilate into, His body. This entrance is the completion of the divine Love’s offering to be reunited with Him and restored to Creation in the way it had always meant to be (230-231). God had always planned for the sacraments to be the authentic reentry into original being—the return of the Creative order to its destiny.
As Ratzinger notes, we are blessed with the opportunity to enter into Christ’s own history through His gratuitous gift of salvation recognized in and through the sacraments. Similarly, Bouyer also makes the point that the world is in God, not the other way around. We enter into His history, and are immersed in Him (231). In other words, the cosmos are the very expression of the Divine Love and these same cosmos were redeemed and adopted by this Love. Through Bouyer’s work, we catch a greater glimpse into the divine plan and see that we were always meant to be sons and daughters of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It was that same Love that, by its necessity in being Love Itself, produced the world, and when we fell away from Him, brought us back to Love and re-incorporated us into Him. Sacraments—the means of this re-incorporation—are thus not simply pleasant rites of passage within the Church. Sacraments are God’s expression of His divine Love wherein He had always planned to reunite us with Him and restore us into the divine Creation we were destined to become.
The sacraments offer this reunification through a restoration of man as person, created in the image of the personal God. Bouyer notes that the God of Christianity is not purely transcendent, nor immanent only in an abstraction. Before doing this, Bouyer points to the difficulties that the Greek philosophers had in reconciling the divine’s distance and proximity to human reality. He wrote that they were “never able to stop confusing God with the world, and never really grasped the omnipresence of God in the world” (182). What was lacking for the ancient philosophers was the notion of personhood. Bouyer later continues by stating, “For Plato, the invisible world was one of ideas, whereas the invisible world Christians believe in is one of persons” (196). In other words, for the Christian, Love and person are intrinsically connected, therefore divine Love cannot simply be an idea. Divine Love is the Trinity—the great communion of Love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that continuously extends to the Creation made in its image—a communion of Persons engaging in “exchanges so rich and deep as to totally defy our attempts at analysis” (185). By accepting and receiving the sacraments, we do not just reiterate an idea or a thought, but are truly reconciled with God Himself.
Ratzinger also extends this reality of personhood to the sacraments, through which man’s being as person is realized. In discussing the supernatural nature of a meal, he states that man discovers that “his ‘being-there’ [Dasein] is grounded in communion with, or ‘being-with’ [Mitsen mit] the world” (157). The meal, exalted in the form of the Eucharistic Lord, carries the individual from purely an individual detached from community to their true created self. In this, what is realized through the sacraments and in the persons of the Trinity is their image in God.
Therefore, when we receive a sacrament, we are not just going through a meaningless production or empty ritual. We are being restored to the Father’s Love and thus being recreated into who we were meant to be. Going even further, we enter into the plan that He had for us from the beginning. Through the ready and willing acceptance of these sacraments, we enter into the divine life. We become part of the return of the created order back to God and in turn witness the world becoming divine (Bouyer, 232-233)!
—
Works Cited
Bouyer, Louis. Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1988.
Ratzinger, Joseph. Theology of the Liturgy, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 153-168.