Pieper and Ratzinger, both theologians basing their rationale and work from philosophical bases, begin with the anthropological dimension of the human person ordered toward festivity, glimpsing into the essence of the question: “What is man?” The word ‘festivity’ comes from an association with the imbued meanings of ‘celebration’ and ‘rest’, which battles in a dichotomy of work. Work, in its meaning, is an action meant to have a finishing point, which is not the same as an end, a telos. Work is not permanent and performed to achieve something and is not a constant state of being. It is a state of doing, which man is not intended to do. Both Pieper and Ratzinger begin with this anthropological dimension of humanity because it re-orientates the audience’s view to the meaning of man, which is to exist within the Beatific Vision as his telos.
Pieper divulges in his work, In Search of the Sacred, the lingual meaning behind the word “celebration”, which is enveloped in the meaning of festivity. He describes that a “‘sacred action’ requires ‘celebration’. The verb celebrare, ‘from the earliest time of classical Latin up to the language of the liturgy’ invariably means the same: carrying out an action, in an ordinary manner, on the part of the community” (Pieper, 26). One who celebrates is celebrating an event in community with the other. And as the sacred action of the liturgy is the work of the Body of Christ, Pieper emphasizes that this is a communal act. As man is created to be in communion with neighbor in the horizontal reality and with God in the vertical reality, the liturgy is a sacred partaking in both communions. Setting apart the space for the “sacred action”, Pieper explains that the spaces of liturgical worship are “set apart, no less by their simplicity than by the splendor and magnificence, from the structure of everyday existence, from its numbing misery as well as from its deceptive complacency and ease” (Pieper, 32). The liturgical celebration is a foretaste of Heavenly Union, the eternal bliss and celebration of the Beatific Vision. Man’s desire and participation in celebration, that which is perfected in the liturgical act on earth, is his anthropological end. Pieper’s philosophical approach ending in a theological telos of man opens up the scene for Ratzinger to examine the historical man orienting this knowledge toward his anthropology.
Ratzinger offers a historical light to the problem of sacramentality by first observing that there is a dominant materialism that reigns in the secular mind, blocking the opportunity for the object to be more than just an object. Examining the way that man was created, Ratzinger offers aspects of the biological that sustains man, which can offer a type of natural theological perspective – nature itself lends to the sacramentality of the world. Examples of receiving sustenance from food or the reality of life and death are created realities directly pointing to man needing dependence on the other. Ratzinger calls these points “junctures” and recalls Schleiermacher as these “creation sacraments” are “the fissures through which the eternal looks into the uniformity of the human routine” (Ratzinger, 156). Because man cannot make or create the presupposed reality of needing food to live or the sexual act to reproduce, Ratzinger uses this dependence as the hinge to his argument for man’s anthropological orientation toward something beyond, that which sustains him. Along with this created biological orientation, Ratzinger explores the realm of the human mind, having the shared experience of guilt, which comes from the understanding that a person deviates from the ontological reality of himself and humanity surrounding. Consequently, religions throughout history have responded to this guilt “when an attempt is made to cleanse the spiritual by corporeal methods,…contain[ing] a moving cry for purification” (Ratzinger, 159).
In a final shift toward the meaning behind the Christian sacrament, Ratzinger highlights that the Incarnation radically transforms our perceived worldview of the material. God as the transcendent mystery known as YHWH by the Israelites are now beholding Christ as the Son of God here present dwelling among them. With a transformation of the essence of man to become partakers in the divine life through the Paschal Mystery, this is another reason that the historical symbol is now sacramental. He gives a symbol like water, which can now be seen to refresh the weary traveler for new life or perhaps the depth and breadth of the mystery of the Father, which Christ channels His followers to (Ratzinger, 161). But, this reemphasizes Ratzinger’s point: “Things are more than things” (161). The material is not just utilized for man’s immediate satisfaction. There is still something outside of man, which the historical need points the human mind to.
But, here the question still remains: What does this historical analysis have to do with man’s orientation toward festivity?
Using the similar analogy of language, Ratzinger joins the thought of Pieper to describe the elevation of the vertical reality in sacramentality. Ratzinger puts it simply: “my humanity is realized in the word, in the language that shapes my thought and initiates me into the neighborly community that influences my own humanity” (Ratzinger, 163). Just like Pieper’s comparison of poetry and prose, Ratzinger expounds the historical reality outlines that man cannot simply sustain himself. That which goes before him and the inability to break from history point us to the vertical reality. Partaking in this horizontal reality of continuously obtaining all that sustains man, the human person is oriented to something greater than himself. The dichotomy of work and festivity demonstrates the “transparency” of the created to point to the divine, which is precisely what the sacrament does – making the invisible divine reality present in the material. Festivity, rest, celebration is what the human strives for because everything is sustained, everything is made full and there is no need to replenish or search for what man is dependent on. And with Pieper’s description of the “sacred action” as communal and Ratzinger’s historical dependency of both mind and body, the sacraments help us to achieve salvation as an incarnational participation in the Trinity, who sustains both body and soul as an eternal community.
Quotations from the works of Joseph Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy and Josef Pieper, In Search of the Sacred