You’re in a meeting with someone, who says that the sacraments are just part of a generally graced world. The world is full of grace and so are the sacraments. How would you respond to this person based on what you read in de Lubac?
While I would love to hear more about what it means to you that “the world is full of grace and so are the sacraments,” and why you might think this, I am going to assume that you are saying that the sacraments and the world – or creation – are similar expressions or experiences of God’s grace.
Any creation can profoundly communicate about its creator; I am glad that when you look at the world you can see the fingerprints of God. However, I think we need to be careful when we use the term “grace.” It can have multiple meanings and refer to quite different things. Do you think that grace is any gift from God? Anything that is infused by God’s presence? That which communicates God? Goodness in general? Theologian Henri DeLubac continuously counters the idea that the whole world is sacramental and contains God’s glory along with the implications this has on human nature, a view called intrinsicism. DeLubac did not think anyone could glance out their window and see grace. Whether because he lived through the atrocities of two World Wars or because he particularly experienced the great gulf between human nature and God’s love, he did not believe that one could simply look at nature to see grace because the whole world is not already graced. Furthermore, there must be a renewal or supernatural change brought about in one to see grace in nature. As he states in describing the term Sacramentum mundi, “ The whole of creation is one grand book which would suffice to reveal to man the divine wisdom, if sin had not darkened his vision. This theme was dear to St. Bonaventure, among others. When one’s vision is purified, the divine significance of creation reappears” (213).
Creatures were created to behold the face of God (or for the “supernatural” in DeLubac’s terms). They naturally, by God’s gratuitous grace, are ordered toward this end, but only as the experience of a lack that can only be filled by God. God gave us the restlessness in our hearts that says “there must be more to life than this.” While we are made to see God and have the capacity for it, we are broken and in need of grace. Since God and humanity exist in such separate orders, with human nature and human destiny in “infinite disproportion” (32), we cannot walk further on the same road and reach God; God must elevate us to the level of His presence. This “elevating” by God is not something extra added to human life; it is something more intimate and profound – an adoption, assimilation, incorporation through penetration that lifts one up to divinization. If the sacraments are just another part of a grace-filled world, we are missing a fundamental part of our vocation – the grace of sharing in divine life that can come from inner transformation.
There is something fundamentally wrong with us as human beings; we are broken. While it may not be popular to talk about, DeLubac states that “one does not in the least need to be a Christian to understand or even simply to feel and see, despite all the efforts at camouflaging it, that evil is inherent in our human condition” (132). Guilt is universally felt. To not experience guilt is considered a major psychological disorder. This guilt, this feeling of shame or wrongness or incompleteness, comes from a rupture, a breaking away from our relationship with God that divides us against ourselves, and this rupture is called sin. Sin is not simply a social or moral category or “the simple refusal to abide by a law, even a divine law, but a refusal of God’s invitation to share his life” (169). However, grace can mean forgiveness, mercy, and pardon. While people do not like to need mercy, it is offered to us personally by God. In taking on human nature with His divine nature in the incarnation, Jesus Christ bridges humanity and divinity (nature and the supernatural). In living out his self-giving love to the end, He offers redemption by healing our wounded freedom, setting us free from that which enslaves us, to bring about the union of human nature and grace.
This redemption, this healing that allows for the sharing in divine life that we are called to, is not a simple or sterile elevation, but a turning over and inside-out; it is complete conversion. According to DeLubac, the sinful person is the one who is always gratuitously called to conversion, to divine life, which is given gratuitously along with the pardon of his or her sins. This is the remedy the sacraments offer. In a ruptured relationship and saying “no” to God, the sacraments heal and sanctify. They are effective. They cannot be seen as a mere part of “a generally graced world.” They are so much more, changing hearts, minds, and wills, bringing about a share in God’s divine life through the infusion of God’s outstretched Spirit.
God calls each of us to radical transformation that only He can bring about; “This salvation, this sharing in the divine life, was offered to man in Christ; and the Church of Christ has received the commission to transmit it to all generations.”(170). The Church’s role, its entire identity and reason for being, is to offer the sacramental life that elevates the human to divine life. This is no small task. It involves an encounter with God that completely differs from any found in the world. While acknowledging the good and revelatory everywhere corrects a dualistic thinking that pits flesh and spirit or God and the world against each other, it also risks flattening the dynamics of grace and divine mystery. As DeLubac reminds us, “Nothing more surely leads one to misinterpret Christianity than the claim to “understand” it” (75-6).