There are two connections I hope to draw between Bouyer’s Cosmos and Ratzinger’s article on the sacraments, one particular and one thematic and broad. The first is a particular focus on matter and the modern concept of matter as purely material and yet somehow a principle of reality. Bouyer focuses on this in his penultimate chapter in which he attempts to define matter and spirit. He notes, via Collingwood and Piper, that most “Materialists” tend to use the word in a manner more akin to God, in that it is a foundation or origin of all that exists. He notes that the ancients, primarily Aristotle, saw matter as a pure abstraction, the “substratum or supposition of everything visible or tangible,” (220) upon which substance is predicated. By itself, however, matter is “pure abstraction, made into a substance only at the cost of inextricable contradictions” (221). In other words, matter does not exist in reality outside of a “society of spirits” (222), who perceive and through the foundation of language perceive meaning in material things. But materiality is the periphery of the spiritual reality within the existing thing, most fully realized in the human person, a spiritual being.
Ratzinger also notes this modern emphasis on matter as a principle of reality, and “matter as material” (153) meaning as a unit of physical substance – as we head toward contradictions – that makes up all reality. Things are merely things, and their thingness is simply material, simply physical. For both Bouyer and Ratzinger, not only is the modern conception of materialism contradictory, it is simply out of touch with reality. Not substance can be perceived, that is physical, and yet devoid of any characteristic, predication, or, more significantly, form. And yet that is how we view “matter” in our modern age (somehow). This focus on matter offers, in my opinion, a practical first step towards ingesting a sacramental worldview. Without a paradigm shift, in which reality is revealed to be primarily spiritual, and matter is not what Locke told you, then entering into a sacramental view of reality becomes impossible in ordinary human routine.
In a broader, more thematic sense, both Ratzinger and Bouyer attend to the reality of the sacraments by prioritizing their fundamental existence throughout history. Ratzinger offers two questions to attend to the crisis of sacramentality: What is man? And what is a sacrament? Most contemporary readers might argue that the former should be addressed first, seeing that we are talking about something foundational in our understanding of reality: ourselves. The genius of Ratzinger here is that he starts with the latter question, orienting the reader toward a deeper understanding of the meaning of the word, and showing us that in fact we can only understand ourselves through the sacraments, the fissured through which the supernatural enters the temporal. Bouyer does the same throughout Cosmos, by attending to the history of mankind but constantly reminding the reader that mankind is swallowed up by mythos at every stage. That the transcendence of the divine has been immanent in human history, and that Christianity was not a completely original notion, unattached to the past, as Ratzinger points out as well (160). Bouyer, and Ratzinger’s focus on ritual as carrying the human towards divine activity (on page 19 of Cosmos and page 156 of Ratzinger) indicates that the sacraments, be them primeval or instituted by Christ are present, since God permeates the physical world throughout all of history. Bouyer and Ratzinger touch on Jung’s archetypes of king and priest to show that man attempts to reconcile the supernatural with the natural, though often through different means. In other words, both thinkers show the primacy of the sacraments in history, and in offering history a role in man’s salvation. Bouyer, in his emphasis on mythos and logos, and Ratzinger in his description of the natural sacraments provide a more robust understanding of the Christian sacraments as more than mere remedies to sin, but in fact authentications, stamps, of the Divine in the temporal, instituted by Christ but experienced in the Spirit and the Word throughout human history. Matter is not simply physical, things are not merely things, but “cosmified”, “charged with the grandeur of God.”