Category: Sacraments

In his 2005 encyclical Deus caritas est exploring the intricacies of Christian love, Pope Benedict XVI argues that the sacraments are part of the Church’s “deepest nature” and are an “inseparable” part of her duty.¹ Alongside proclaiming the Gospel and exercising works of charity, the sacraments cannot divorced from being Church, as they are core to what it means to be in life with Christ. Christ dispensed the sacraments to the Church so that she may be in radical friendship with Him. The seven sacraments — Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist, Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick, and Matrimony and Holy Orders, are the vitality that fills the organs of the Church, giving her vibrancy and intimacy with Christ her bridegroom, allowing to perform her sacred duties in accordance with the will of God.

In Meeting Christ in the Sacraments, Coleman O’Neill depicts the Church herself as fundamentally sacramental, conveying a vision of what sacraments are beyond the seven defined rites. It is not just the case that the Church is home to the seven sacraments: Rather, she is by her very nature sacramental, in that she is a sign to the world of God’s love and an instrument of union with Him. O’Neill builds this idea to propose exactly why she is home to the seven sacraments, because through being sacrament the Church lives out her intimate relationship with Christ as a holistic way of life, the seven pinnacle manners of which we call “the sacraments”.

To build a lens both wider in scope but also chiefly Christological, O’Neil extends the reader’s vision on the limits of the sacraments by defining them as “all material realities connected with the Incarnation”.² Certainly, O’Neil is not suggesting that there are more than the seven sacraments, as if there are undiscovered rites like there undiscovered creatures deep within the Amazon. Instead, he is encouraging his reader to see the fundamental movement of sacraments themselves as a movement in, through, and with Christ. Too often, we constrain our conception of sacrament to seven modes, rather than seeing the world in the manner by which the sacraments themselves operate in. None of the sacraments would have any meaning or purpose without Christ. They all have meaning, substance, and purpose because of their connection with Him. More broadly, it must also be considered that the grace of God poured out through Christ is not limited to the seven defined sacraments. Therefore, we must see that sacraments “derive from Christ”, that Christ Himself is the “original and foundational sacrament of Christianity”, and when we consider the issue of Church, we see again a way of life that only has meaning and purpose in terms with Christ.

Just as the seven rites of the Church are sacraments because of their relation with Christ, so too does O’Neil see the Church as necessarily caught up with Christ in the most fundamental sense. To the wider world, the Church is an “efficacious sign of salvation”, “the manifestation in the world of the redemption achieved by Christ”.³ To Christians within the Church, growing in life with Christ, “[the baptized, confirmed, and ordained members of the Church] form the visible sign of Christ’s activity within and through the Church”.⁴ This language of signs is precise sacramental language, as the sacraments themselves are integrations with spiritual and sacred realities shown to us under physical signs. So too with being Church. Just as Christ is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity under the signs of bread and wine in the Eucharist, so too is the Church a united heavenly and earthly worship of the Triune God under the signs of the people of the Church on Earth, pointing all of God’s people towards entry into that worship. Our eyes physically see bread and wine when observing the Eucharist, but with the eyes of faith, we see Christ Himself; the world sees a community of religious people known as Christians with a particular history, liturgy, and way of life, but with the eyes of faith the world can coactively see an eternal divine worship that unites heaven and earth, for which, as Louis Bouyer would suggest, existence and the cosmos itself is a stage of worship for.

The linchpin of the Church’s sacramental identity is the gift of Christ’s body to her in the Paschal sacrifice, remembered and made proximate again in the Eucharist. During his time in the world, Christ’s body was “the sacrament of redemption”, glorified by his sacrifice.⁵ But O’Neil, in drawing from St. Paul, points out that the role of the Church is to participate in the “fullness” of this physical body, which is the in the mystical body of Christ. Incorporation into the mystical body of Christ is critical for understanding being Church because just like the sacraments, the notion of “mystical” suggests seen and unseen elements. The Church on Earth engages in divine worship at Mass, and what the world sees is a gathering of various types of people in a physical building performing particular actions in a regimented manner. When they think of “Church”, they may think of the Church hierarchy and of highly visible individuals like the Pope of the college of Bishops. But all of these things are the seen elements of the Church. To get a fuller idea of what constitutes being Church, the saints in heaven who are engaged in the same worship alongside the Church on Earth must also be considered. This is why St. Paul in the Letter to the Ephesians suggests mystical degrees of further fullness into “[Christ’s] body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way”.⁶ Later, St. Augustine will famously refer to this as totus Christus, the suggestion that Christ is made more fully complete in his relationship with the Church through his will for mankind coming to fruition.⁷ When the Church communes with the sacraments that Christ bestowed upon her, for the purpose of further union with Him, totus Christus becomes an efficacious reality affecting not Christ but rather the Church, since she becomes bound as one in the love of God and directed in her mission.

The mark of the Church “holy” reminds us that what makes the Church set apart is her intimate relationship with Christ, which allows her to meet Him sacramentally, acted through the sacraments we receive as Christians. This is why her very nature is sacramental. Everything that the Church does is caught up in her relationship with Him, is directed towards union with Him, and points the world into accomplishing His desire for union with the humanity He became flesh amongst. O’Neill’s Christocentric conception of the sacraments is crucial for broadening our vision of sacraments beyond seven categories of signs and effects, and more in line with a teleological vision of being Church.

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Cover art: “Disputation of the Holy Sacrament” (c. 1509), by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael (1483-1520).

1. Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, 25. ↩︎
2. O’Neill, Meeting Christ in the Sacraments, p.78 ↩︎
3. Ibid., p.78-79 ↩︎
4. Ibid., p.98 ↩︎
5. Ibid., p.80 ↩︎
6. Ephesians 1:22-23, NAB ↩︎
7. “To that flesh the Church is joined, and so there is made the whole Christ [totus Christus], Head and body” (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 1.2, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/170201.htm). Augustine’s conception of totus Christus is a controversial subject of much debate in the topic of Christology. But Kimberly Baker does in excellent job seeing Augustine’s notion of totus Christus in a more ecclesiological and sacramental light by rooting totus Christus in the Church, and in particular, in mission, unity, and the love of God. See: “Augustine’s Doctrine of the Totus Christus: Reflecting on the Church as Sacrament of Unity”, Horizons, Volume 37, Issue 1, Spring 2010, p.7-24. ↩︎

Many readers of French Jesuit Henri de Lubac have been critical his manner of description of human nature. De Lubac’s central argument – that the telos of man is to be enfolded ultimately in the life of God, to move from what is natural towards what is supernatural – is not where the criticism brews. Rather, the controversy is much more narrow. Does Henri de Lubac propose an intrinsicist view of nature, suggesting that human beings already possess deep down the supernatural life? Thereby suggesting that the goal of man is to summon what they already possess? The debate over these rhetorical particularities is not at all frivolous — this issue is certainly worth dissecting because if de Lubac is proposing an intrinsicist model of human nature, then it would perhaps compromise to a meaningful degree the radical necessity of the divine life reaching down into our broken humanity and making it anew in grace.

However, a thorough re-reading of de Lubac shows how he deliberately discusses nature in contrast to the supernatural, which by design firmly separates the two. What brings them together though, in de Lubac’s mind, is the divinely ordained vocation of human nature to assume the supernatural. Throughout his writing, he uses vocational language to argue how human nature is called to enter into the divine life because human nature lacks exactly that. And it is this divine life that makes human nature born anew and made what it is supposed to be. This focus on vocation suggests that the supernatural is not inherent to human nature, as all vocation necessitates a change of state. Human nature is called to overcome itself and the perilous stain of sin to become something else, something fuller, and ultimately become enfolded into the fuller life of the divine.

Perhaps one reason why many are quick to critique de Lubac is because he is generous in his description of the accessibility of the supernatural. In very outset of A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, he states plainly that just like the ideas of Creation, the concept of revelation, and the necessity of the Church, the supernatural is “present everywhere”.¹ This initial description is quite proliferous – wouldn’t the term “everywhere” suggest that it is present within human nature? But no argument is sufficiently elaborated in the first dozen pages, so therefore we must read much more broadly to extract more precisely on how de Lubac contrasts human nature and the supernatural.

De Lubac himself admits that the term “nature” is a loaded word that must be “employed judiciously”.² Despite its myriad of applicable uses, he stresses that it must be used in a theological context alongside the term “supernatural”. This distinction is critical because it suggests complete and incomplete natures, and human beings possess by definition an incomplete nature when standing before the divine. He does not commonly use language of elevation or deification, which is more common in more traditional meditations on grace like Bernard of Clairveaux or Bonaventure. Rather, the focus for de Lubac is what human nature was made for, using a teleological angle to describe human nature. Our nature is teleologically oriented towards the divine life, and it is to fulfill itself that our nature assumes the supernatural. If he were using an intrincicist approach, the conclusion would instead be that human beings participate already in what they were made for, that they are caught up in the supernatural even before receiving the fundamental sacraments of Baptism or Eucharist.

A useful section that helps outline this issue is de Lubac’s section on the Church. Because the Church is ultimately not of the world but has institutional elements that bind it to the world, perhaps it may be a helpful gauge to distinguish what exactly is the difference between human nature and the supernatural. When considering the role of the Church, de Lubac makes it clear that the Church has a calling that is not found in the world. Otherwise, the Church would be distilled to one style of governance organizing individuals among many like governments or businesses. For de Lubac, the “irreplaceable mission” of the Church is to “remind us…of our divine supernatural vocation” and to repeatedly instill that mission into the hearts of the faithful.³ This focus on vocation is vital for a thorough reading of de Lubac because it conveys again the teleological angle of human nature towards a supernatural life that perfects it. The Church cannot be accurately described by how it appears on Earth as a hierarchical institution comprised of human beings because its foundation comes from the supernatural and because her mission is to bring the natural into the supernatural life that is not of the world. As de Lubac writes: “Every notion which tends to bring down the supernatural order to the level of nature tends…to mistake the Church for the world, to conceive of her after the model of human societies”.⁴ The Church is acutely aware that the supernatural is not inherent to mankind, which is why it is her chief duty to guide mankind into becoming enfolded into a more perfect life that is not of the world. If the Church is reduced into a hierarchical organization that organizes human beings in a manner not much unlike other hierarchical organizations that are of the world, she is deprived of this sacred duty that calls mankind into the essential pursuit of the divine life.

A critic attributing an intrinsic view upon de Lubac may point to another part of that same section, where de Lubac suggests that “our divine life” is “hidden” and must be drawn to the forefront. If the divine life is hidden within us, wouldn’t that suggest that the divine life is indeed intrinsic to our nature, since it is accessible within us? Perhaps, in isolation, criticism here is warranted, but all thorough reading of a text requires broader context. Throughout this section, de Lubac repeatedly uses the term “vocation” to describe the duty of the Church to unite with the divine life. Vocation in its essence requires a transition between states of being: If the divine life is already within us and intrinsic to our nature, then what exactly are we being called to? All vocation necessitates a transition from a non-divine life into the divine life, and when he suggests the divine life is “hidden” within us, he is suggesting more so that it is accessible and within our grasps.

A vocation must indicate an authentic change into a new state of being that was not previously the constitution of the former state. A young man answering a vocation into the priesthood is entering into a new life where he will become a new man. A bride and groom – formerly independent and autonomous – become something new when they become one flesh.⁵ In Genesis, God calls Abram into a new land where he will become Abraham and father a new nation: “Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). If the divine life is intrinsic to our nature, it would suggest that these vocations are awakenings of a nature already present, rather than an entrance into something fundamentally and radically new. In order to fully understand de Lubac, one must see how his description of human nature is rooted in this central theme of vocation, aruging that to be human is to be called into a new life in the divine.

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Cover art: “Abraham and the Angels”, by Chinese artist He Qi

1. De Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, p.9 ↩︎
2. Ibid., p.13 ↩︎
3. Ibid., p.110 ↩︎
4. Ibid., p.109,110 ↩︎
5. Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:5; Mark 10:8; Ephesians 5:31 ↩︎

One of the major catalysts for the USCCB’s National Eucharistic Revival (2022-2025) was a 2019 Pew Research poll on Eucharistic belief that concerned the bishops. This poll suggested that only 39% of Catholics believed the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation, whereas 61% believed that the Eucharist was a “symbol”.¹ The U.S. bishops’ concerns were well warranted: It would appear, at first glance at least, that the Church’s teaching on Eucharist, despite being the “source and summit of the Christian life,” was somehow one of the least understood doctrines of the faith.²

However, a deeper consideration of the question may be necessary. For starters, we must analyze the binary proposed by the poll: Is it the case that the Eucharist is either the transubstantiated Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ, or a symbol? Are those the only options? A doctrine as timelessly deep and rich as Eucharist almost certainly cannot be distilled to a simple multiple-choice question.

It is likely the case that the poll accurately suggests that the Church’s teaching on Eucharist — that it is the true Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the living Christ under the physical signs of bread and wine — is not widely understood by many Catholics, despite the centrality of the sacrament. In this sense, the predicate for the Revival is valid. But the framing of the poll presents an imprecise binary — we must admit as well that the Eucharist is also a symbol. A symbol, defined by Cambridge English Dictionary, is “a sign, shape, or object that is used to represent something else”.³ In addition to being Christ himself, the Eucharist also represents concurrent historical and ecclesial truths that operate alongside transcendent sacramental realities, like the nature of our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, and the stage of salvation history that the Eucharist enters into. These relationships are made hyper-real sacramentally, but still have meaningful symbolic significance. British theologian Monika K. Hellwig considers the Eucharist to be “the symbol of our relationship in and through Jesus Christ and with one another”.⁴ It has valid symbolic elements in being “an expression of joy and celebration,” with its institution during the sacred Passover night of Seder, whereby the Judaism solemnly remembers when God liberated Israel from slavery. Secondly, it creates “a gathering of the people of God” where divisions among men are broken down, and all people eat of one meal to strengthen our bonds. Finally, it is the signal to the world of God’s “redemptive divine hospitality to a world gone astray”, a reminder of God’s ultimate intention to reunite with a wayward Creation.⁵

The arc of Creation becoming wayward and led back to itself is told in salvation history, as recounted in Sacred Scripture and carried in the Church’s tradition. The concurrent truths of Eucharist in being both God Himself poured out for mankind as well as being representative of our relationships and our history summarizes the dual sacramental contributions of Louis Bouyer and Jean Daniélou. Salvation history tells the story of mankind having its relationship reconciled with God in Christ, and how the sacraments are symbolic of and make happen again — as if for the first time — the occurrence of that saving history. Bouyer and Daniélou are important to study because they both propose a living history of the world that the sacraments bring the faithful into and make alive.

Bouyer considers the phenomena of “myth” as a “preamble to the development of rational thinking or of biblical revelation”.⁶ Myth is a stage in the evolution of the religious consciousness of mankind, a tool that approximates perceived truths from interacting with the cosmos to graspable stories. These graspable stories are akin to the process of assigning concepts to perceptions by rationalist philosopher Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason: “So then, all human knowledge [Erkenntnis] begins with perceptions, goes from there to concepts, and ends with ideas”.⁷ Pre-biblical examples of these stories include the conceptual assignment of the Babylonian king as a servant of the fertility gods to favor a good harvest, or on another level, the worship of the Pharaoh as the bodily incarnation of the Egyptian god Horus to please the powerful gods Osiris and Isis.⁸ The evolutionary process of myth culminates itself in fuller shades of transcendent truth found in biblical revelation and the progression of rational thought.

Unlike secular rationalists such as Kant (who wasn’t necessarily an atheist but certainly rejected the reliability of biblical revelation), Bouyer believes that biblical revelation is a critical stage in the collective consciousness of man grasping truths about the cosmos. Biblical revelation is key for Bouyer because it makes “fully explicit and literally fundamental in the Bible, that nothing exists except by the sovereign will of God”.⁹ Biblical revelation affirms above all else the kingship of God, and the story of salvation history as told in the Bible is the story of mankind participating in the kingship and life of the living God in the cosmos we find ourselves in. This cosmos, which “exists only for the glory of the creator,” is “a celebration of uncreated glory through the whole time of creation”.¹⁰ Therefore, when one participates in the sacraments, they are entering into that celebration for which the world was created for, bringing the most core function of the cosmos to the forefront.

As classic biblical theology has long held, the Old and New Testaments reveal one another, and from this foundation Jean Daniélou argues that the mutual revelation in their typology is the very story that we enter into when we participate in the sacraments. This shows how In Daniélou’s view, salvation history is not a static history in the past, but a living history that the sacraments unite us to. “The sacraments present two aspects. First there is the reality already accomplished, and this is in continuity with the works of God in the two Testaments. But there is also the visible sign…by means of which the action of God operates”.¹¹ He uses Baptism as an example: Baptism connects with the Jewish symbolism of destruction, both the destruction of the Earth in the Deluge and the Egyptians in the Red Sea. But this is typologically fulfilled with the “creative” waters of the New Testament which “bring forth a new creature”.¹² Therefore, when we receive the sacrament of Baptism, we become the new creature that is purged in the Old Testament, shown anew in Christ in the Jordan River, and made anew in our lives in our own Baptism.

An important additional element Daniélou’s sacramental view draws from the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem, where the participation is made more apparent in the imitation. In this sense, salvation history is participated in by being imitated and made real in the present. “A sacrament is…a real participation in the grace of Christ, by a sacramental imitation of his life”.¹³ Consider the connection between this and the Pew Research poll referenced at the start: The Eucharist is a symbol in that in imitating what Christ instituted during the Passover meal, but in addition, it is also an active participation in the transcendent life of Christ by becoming his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. There is a meaningful relationship between the symbolic nature of sacraments and the sacred reality that they make real, since the sacred reality permeates higher realities in our lives, and the symbolism extends the sacred realities across broader domains of our lives.

The world is a stage for the worship of the divine, and salvation history tells the story of God’s guiding hand alongside our awakening of a fuller celebration of this worship. In acting out biblical history in the sacraments, it becomes even more real, and a more intimate worship of the transcendent God sensed by all open hearts becomes radically alive in the world. Bouyer and Daniélou suggest that salvation history is not a benign collection of old stories locked in the past, but a living history accessible in the sacramental life. When we participate in that living history, the sacred becomes tangible, both making our lives in intimate contact with the divine, more fully themselves, and aligned with meaningful symbolism that permeates countless domains of our being.

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Cover art: “The Last Supper” (1977), by Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe (1913-1996).

1. Pew Research, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ”, August 5, 2019: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/ ↩︎
2. CCC 1324; Lumen Gentium (LG), 11. It is worth noting that the Vatican uses other equivalent language in its current English translation of LG that has an interesting sacramental undertone, calling the Eucharist the “fount and apex of the whole Christian life”: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. The term “fount” here, connected to the term “fountain”, highlights inherent unity between Eucharist and the sacrament of Baptism. ↩︎
3. Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/symbol ↩︎
4. Hellwig, “The Eucharist as Symbol“, Way Publications, The Way, p.73, January 1, 1990 ↩︎
5. Ibid., p.75, 81 ↩︎
6. Bouyer, Cosmos, p.23 ↩︎
7. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787), B 730, republished by De Gruyter, 1923. My translation. From the original German: “So fängt denn alle menschliche Erkenntnis mit Anschauungen an, geht von da zu Begriffen, und endigt mit Ideen.“ ↩︎
8. Bouyer, p.29-30 ↩︎
9. Ibid., p.36 ↩︎
10. Ibid., p.200 ↩︎
11. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, p.6 ↩︎
12. Ibid., p.7 ↩︎
13. Ibid., p.118 ↩︎

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

1. “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/ ↩︎
2. 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 ↩︎
3. “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 ↩︎

Recently, I became engaged. Weddings, famously, are very expensive — When I was a younger man, I keenly remember recoiling at hearing about their costs. For one day, I would think, they are an astonishingly quick way to burn several thousand dollars. From my self-centered, utilitarian mindset, I scoffed at the absurdity of not allocating those financial resources towards longer-term investments: A new car, a down payment for a house, paying off student loans, or even just placing it in a money market account to accrue interest. After all, from a secular mindset, isn’t just about the marriage license and the tax benefits anyway?

Of course, what is lacking in that mindset is that it is looking at marriage from something akin to an empirical perspective. I was seeing it not as a participation in a world beyond me, but rather in how it affects the world of me. What does a sacramental worldview suggest instead? There looms more deeply within this a question about means and ends. What is my marriage for? What is the festival nature of the wedding oriented towards? Why is celebrating core to who we are? Josef Pieper and Joseph Ratzinger both offer insights in their writings on these deeper questions. They each contribute towards a vision of festivity as being central to seeing our fuller human identity, and reclaiming this vision of festivity is crucial for developing a more thorough and complete sacramental worldview. Sacraments, because they are celebrated rather than merely done, are an ongoing process of communal formation that is an end in it of itself. In a world littered with optimizing means towards ends, we have lost the ability to rest in the formative world of celebrations that are for their own sake.

Reclaiming an authentic sacramental worldview requires reclaiming a fuller understanding of what we mean by “sacred”. If sacraments are “sacred” – as its etymology suggests – how is their nature distinct from non-sacred phenomena? Josef Pieper considers how the reason why we celebrate sacraments as opposed to completing them. He argues that “sacred action” requires “celebration” because there is a coordinated process of the physical signs of the celebrant (vestments, vessels, gestures, etc.) playing out alongside the “’contemplative’ coaction of the congregation” (Pieper, In Search of the Sacred, 26-7)”. The term “coaction” here is vital. Coaction aptly describes a sacramental worldview because it reflects the harmonious agreement of multiple realities jointly acting alongside one another. Just as sacraments are physical signs of a deeper reality, so too are the physical gestures and actions of the liturgy signs of the deeper reality of the participants’ personal contemplation. There is not a battle between two competing realities for one to engulf the other, nor a strict replacement of the “more important” spiritual reality over the physical, but rather a coaction of physical signs acting alongside spiritual realities.

This coactive description of physical signs and working with deeper spiritual realities is profoundly difficult for the modern person to consider, as the chief source of truth today is what is deducible only from physical realities. If information cannot derive purely from physical phenomena in a measurable and replicable manner, how can we verify its authenticity?

Joseph Ratzinger adds an additional element by showing how the sacramental worldview clashes with the modern fixation on maximizing utility and functionality. For the modern man, a sacramental worldview is “too religious for him” because it is religious to the point beyond utility. For the modern man, religion is like a lucky rabbit’s foot or a divine grace dispensary — when physical solutions fail to deliver, begrudgingly seek a divine solution! The modern man lacks “any practical reason” to explore deeper realities beyond unless it benefits him personally and imminently. It is not just that he sees them as ancient superstitions from a primitive time destined to extinguish, but even if true, he does not see how it would do him any practical good.

But human beings routinely act upon deeper realities that they intuit beyond the physical. He considers the four primeval sacraments – birth, death, meals, and sex. Although they can be described in plain physical ways, human beings universally understand and act as if their truest reality is much deeper than physical matter moving around in response to physical and chemical forces. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be at the height and depth of human experience. In the primeval sacraments we recognize our “existence in receptivity” (Ratzinger, Theology of the Liturgy, 157). In them, we find ourselves receptive to the forces of world outside of ourselves. For instance, with meals, we depend not only on the earth to provide the nutrition necessary for life, on physical and biological mechanisms to function properly and predictably in order to sustain our lives, but also on the existence of a community larger than us in order to penetrate our hearts and give our existence a meaning beyond mere survival. We know in our hearts that a meal isn’t a meal just by the act of ingesting food, but when it is done in communion with others The necessity of a community to complete a meal is an example of how we understand intuitively that “things are more than things…they are signs whose meaning extends beyond their immediate sensorial power” (158).

In the act of festivity, we find a realm of human experience where the point is empirically unseeable. Nevertheless, for as long as human beings have existed, we have gathered for reasons beyond the functional. In our modern minds, we have forgotten this, since everything has been reduced to the functional, but our bodies still know this deeper truth intuitively. For my upcoming wedding, for instance, there is an understanding amongst everyone involved that despite the cost, there is the pure joy of creating a space of celebration for sake of itself. It is a rare and serenely sweet opportunity: In a world filled with natural suffering, human limitations, and original sin, perhaps the deeper point of festivity is intentionally connecting with concurrent spiritual realities in an act of hope. If our coactive physical acts successfully unites with spiritual realities, then the fallenness of our physical world can be sanctified. Here, we reclaim what we mean by sacrament because we see the physical sanctified by the spiritual. It is not replaced, but rather made more itself, and through our festivities, we come to know more deeply what it means to be ourselves.

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Cover art: “Wedding Procession In The Orel Region”, by Vladimir Egorovic Makovsky (1846-1920)