Recent studies on religious practices have famously documented the rise of a novel religious subgroup in America: The “nones”, the religiously unaffiliated. According to Pew Research, 28% of U.S. adults are “religiously unaffiliated,” not identifying themselves with any defined religious tradition.1 Surprisingly, however, this data does not automatically suggest the collapse of spirituality in America, but rather a hollowing of organized religion.2 According to the Springtide Research Institute, one-in-three young Americans – up from a 2021 statistic of one-in-four — “believe in a higher power or God”.3 The reason why I bring up these statistics when considering Ratzinger and Bouyer is because of a testimonial quote from a spiritually attuned none buried in this Wall Street Journal article: A gentleman named Desmond Adel, a lapsed Christian, now an “agnostic atheist”, stopped attending organized Christian worship events because although he is “convinced there is a higher power,” he believes this higher power is not accurately portrayed by any of the major religions. Desmond can sense that something is there, but his sense of God is beyond any religious tradition he is familiar with (including his previous Christian faith), and detachment from defined religion altogether is his best path. Perhaps when considering how Desmond’s previous Christian faith formed him amidst our modern milieu, much more fundamental questions come to the forefront: What makes Christianity unique? What exactly is the central Christian claim, articulated by the Roman Catholic tradition? What kind of story does it offer to the modern world in its the sacramental life?
Let’s consider the central thesis of Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos. In building a systematic vision of liturgy, Bouyer draws on science, philosophy, primordial history, biblical history, modern phenomenology, anthropology, the consideration of beauty, and several layers of theology to claim that “the whole world is essentially liturgical” (Bouyer, 200). At first glance, this thesis seems to affirm the spiritual instinct of nones like Desmond. Is organized religion absolutely necessary for divine communion? Given that God created everything, it would follow that the world can be traced back to its divine Maker. For the nones, God is omnipresent to a degree where adherence to a clear faith is not necessary since the physical world, and especially the physical world plus a spiritual sense, is sufficient, and perhaps organized religion could even be limiting because it places boxes around He who by definition transcendent.
But remember that the key term in Bouyer’s thesis is liturgical. Focusing on the issue of rightful worship, he is not saying that God is discoverable in a similar manner across our world and our lived experience, but rather that the world itself is a stage designed for worship and, ultimately, communion with the transcendent. In order to more fully dissect the precise claim Bouyer is making, and to gain more language to understand the sacramental view of Christian liturgy, a close reading of Joesph Ratzinger’s “Theology of the Liturgy” is necessary. Ratzinger argues that the Christian faith is essentially unique in what it enters into and what about the broader cosmos it reveals, rebuking competing claims about Christianity being entirely disjointed from preceding religious traditions. In addition, it rebukes the other extreme, the suggestion that Christianity is the articulation of an universal “anonymous Christianity,” that suggests mankind was unconsciously but functionally Christian all along (Ratzinger, 160). Ratzinger’s criticism is not to say that mankind’s religious instinct was aimless and unguided before Jesus of Nazareth, but rather to propose a diligent synthesis that balances God’s full revelation of self in Christ with His concurrent self-revelation in the intelligibility of the cosmos.
Adding another level of precision, Ratzinger claims that entrance into the Christian sacramental life is more than an entrance into a structured tradition or organized religion, but rather an entrance into a living history. For Ratzinger, participation in the Christian sacraments is an entrance into a “history that originates in Christ…which for the first time gives to natural symbolism its binding force and concrete claim” of “the nearness of the one true God” (162). The physical signs present in the sacraments of the Church point to and give tactile truth to the reality of the true God’s presence. God is omnipresent, yes, and therefore discoverable in the natural world, but in the sacraments there is a deeper entrance into and a concrete articulation to truths intuited through one’s lived experience.
In showing us what the sacraments are ultimately for, Ratzinger reminds us that this entrance into Christian history through the sacraments culminates necessarily in “unity with God”. He continues: “To receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ with the belief that this is the saving history that opens up to man the historical contact that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness—into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163). In the sacraments, you not only enter into a historical point in time, but also a living history that makes man more fully himself and man’s ultimate end more clear.
In returning to Bouyer, we see a similar balance between acknowledging valid discovery of the Christian God prior to Christ (which necessitates therefore degrees of truth outside Christianity) but also how Christ is the full revelation of God’s self, and that the purpose of the sacraments is to draw more closely to that in a manner that is deeply transformative. The cosmos is a stage for and an invitation to that life-giving manner of being. He notes that pre-Christian thinkers like Plato observed through reason how divine transcendence is “above multiplicity” (Bouyer, 184), a natural intuition prior to biblical revelation transcendence cannot by definition exist in isolation, but that the “biblical and especially evangelic revelation was required in order to complete this fundamental certitude.” As the Catholic tradition has long held, God is discoverable and knowable within the natural world, as its intelligibility reveals the intelligence of its Maker. But the fullness of revelation is in Jesus Christ, whose full revelation of God’s self – known as the deposit of faith — is taught, protected, and transmitted by His Church. Bouyer makes it clear that liturgically speaking what makes Christianity unique is that the Christian liturgical life celebration is a “sharing in cosmic and supra-cosmic liturgy” (202). This tiered language indicates nearer and farther levels of participation in the eternal celebration of love of the triune God. The discovery through lived experience of truths about the God who desires for Himself to be known is a partial participation in the cosmic liturgy, but the full revelation of the faith reminds us that there are supra-cosmic levels of participation in hyper-real realities communicable in the sacraments. The sacraments are a reminder that unseen worlds constantly escape us and call us into a deeper enfolding into ultimate truth. In this sense, Bouyer sees the uniqueness of the Christian sacramental life being in the ultimate end in divine enfoldment: “One day soon that world, in which all the angels habitually abide, in the very presence of God, along with the saints, will be revealed to us as it once appeared to Jacob [in his dream], as the truest of all, the only one which is to last forever”. In this world, because of our limited experience, we are constantly convinced of what is true by phantasms that are, like Plato’s cave, shadows of what is authentically real. But the sacraments point to and engage in what is fully real, truths that pre-Christian thinker were certainly attuned of, and made fully clear in Christ.
What the nones intuit rightly is that God is more than organized religion. Religion is not God, and the intelligibility of the cosmos and the surreal experience of consciousness suggest that truth is meaningfully graspable outside of pure religious tradition. But as Ratzinger and Bouyer point out, the claim of Christianity goes beyond simply religion, but instead offers an entrance into a living history, a transformative alignment with supernatural truths, and ultimately an eternal relationship with the transcendent God that has made Himself available for all time. The Christian sacramental life gives articulation to truths that are not fully themselves in the physical world alone, revealing a mystically deep structure of reality that invites all human beings into not just simply living in the cosmos but rather being fully engaged in a supra-cosmic liturgy in union with the saints and angels in heaven. The world is a stage for this liturgy, and what the Christian tradition suggests is that there are nearer and farther levels of participation in it. Perhaps as many young people rediscover their spiritual natures, a higher and fuller vision of the cosmos made available by sacraments can be even more fully participated in through God’s Church.
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Cover art: “Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb)”, 15th Century, St. Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium
- “Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe”, Pew Research Institute, January 24, 2024: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/ ↩︎
- Although some years out of date, it is also worth noting the sharper decline church attendance in the Catholic Church as opposed to a shallower decline in attendance at Protestant churches: “Catholics’ Church Attendance Resumes Downward Slide”, Gallup Poll, April 9, 2018: https://news.gallup.com/poll/232226/church-attendance-among-catholics-resumes-downward-slide.aspx ↩︎
- “The Surprising Surge of Faith Among Young People”, published in the Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2023: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-surprising-surge-of-faith-among-young-people-424220bd?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=2 ↩︎