Retrieving the Meaning of the Sacraments from an Individualistic Paradigm
Reflections on assigned texts from my Sacraments masters course at the University of Notre Dame
Illustration of the Incarnation of Christ (John 1:14) of from The Saint John’s Bible (Copyrighted by the Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota)
Understanding historicity as essential to human nature is key to recovering the meaning of the Christian sacraments. This anthropological sense can be difficult to discern today, when individualism — a competing anthropological sensibility — is simply in the waters of our time and inevitably shapes our sense of sacramental participation. There is a real need for recovering the communal, historical nature of the person, in our contemporary consciousness, so that when we, Catholics, approach the altar each week, we know who precisely it is that we are approaching and why we are approaching Him.
Theologians Jospeh Ratzinger and Louis Bouyer offer crucial insights on this task. We’ll look to Raztinger’s essay The Sacramental Foundation of Human Existence, where he explores this historicity of humanity on an anthropological and sacramental level, and Bouyer’s Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, for the larger cosmological context. Each theologian, in these texts, brings into clearer focus the relation of creation to its Creator and the reason for the Christian sacraments. That is to say: they show (albeit in different ways) how God has made his Triune, eternal love a part of human historicity through the earthly life of his Incarnate Son. He has done this for our sake — out of love — for by humankind’s union with the Son in the sacraments, Christ may “unite with all mankind, and through [mankind] with the universe”, restoring all things to Him who loved us into being (Bouyer, 231).
Our Being is Received, Not Made
We will begin by sketching out Ratzinger’s anthropological insight of humanity as historical. This conception of the person can rub against our individualistic sensibilities today, which tend to assume the person as essentially autonomous and self-determining. In contrast, understanding humanity as essentially historical means, in Ratzinger’s words, that “my humanity is realized…in the language that shapes my thought and initiates me into the neighborly community that influences my own humanity” (163). Symbolic language plays an integral role here, for it “is the expression of the continuity of the human mind in the historical development of its nature” (163). Language is not something we humans create on our own, but something we inherit and a way of being in the world that we are born into.
When we consider human nature from this vantage point, we can see how being human ultimately “excludes all autonomy of the bare ego that tries to be self-sufficient” because we, as human creatures, receive our existence, as well as “the sphere of its possibilities and accomplishments through history” (163). Far from existing as an isolated individual who achieves existence through free will, the person is more akin to a thin thread woven into the expansive fabric of human existence, bound in time and intimate entanglement with other human-kin.
The implications of this dimension of human nature are cosmic, which Bouyer parses out through his comprehensive accounting of human history in his text Cosmos. This ambitious accounting brings to life Ratzinger’s notion of the person as historical. By tracing humanity’s realization (or denial) of a sacramental sense of reality through a diverse array of historical genealogies, Bouyer demonstrates how “the divine plan progressed toward its unfailing fulfillment,” though “notwithstanding the deviation on all levels of the created freedoms, because [that plan] used their very failings to promote their ultimate salvation” (Bouyer, 228). Bouyer’s Cosmos, in short, highlights the threads of hope – from the Divine Weaver himself – received and woven into the human spirit, as it has expanded over the ages.
Restorating the Creature to Her Creator
This understanding of the person is key to grasping the cosmological meaning of the Incarnation as well as Christian sacraments. Far from being an abstract reality, God makes his life accessible to us as one of us through the Incarnation of his Son, which has revealed history and “time [as] but the mysterious transit in which the created freedoms” – that is, humankind and the angels* – “signify their consent to the uncreated liberty, in a process of Love calling love.” (231) Through his entrance into history, the God of Love calls all of his creation back into himself by giving us himself: his own life, his history, his language – all characterized by Triune love. According to Ratzinger, the Christian sacraments thus provide for the human person, “in the midst of her insurmountable connection with history and precisely through it”,
a liberating union with God’s eternal love, which has fit itself into this horizontal dimension and thereby has broken into his prison: the chain of the horizontal that binds man has become in Christ the guide rope of salvation that pulls us to the shore of God’s eternity. (Ratzinger, 164)
Through our reception of the sacraments, Christ’s history becomes our own. In my own life, the sacraments have often been presented as a kind of medicinal magic that heals the ailments of our souls and allows us to purportedly achieve some “best version” of ourselves as hard-working, thoughtful members of American society. While there is some truth to this, it seems to overlook the fact that the sacraments – wherein we unite with God – are that very thing for which we are made – that is, God’s own life!
The Christian Sacraments and the Singing Cosmos
Therefore, in the sacraments, the human creature is not healed for healing’s sake, with the “magic medicine” of divine grace, so that she may go and live an Americanized ideal of the “good life.” Rather, she is healed precisely by her encounter in the sacraments with the one for whom she and all of creation is made. In the Church’s celebration and reception of the Eucharist, humanity discovers, as Bouyer writes, “that the Lamb sacrificed even before the creation of the world was the principle of that entire creation” (Cosmos, 189). Through her union with God in the sacraments, humankind weaves the threads of her historically-bound life into the fabric of God, which he made available to her in and through Christ’s life.
In this way, the sacraments are not just religious rites that Christians perform to anesthetize themselves from the harsh realities of human existence; rather, the sacraments are a return of the created order (which includes those harsh realities) back to God the Father. Through this process of restoration, the created universe rediscovers its original form, and Bouyer articulates the nature of that form beautifully: “from the first moment of its existence, the created universe is forever a single chorus praising God, freely answering the eternal Word, who is the expression of the Father himself” (196). Even though “dissonance has crept in”, our world remains fundamentally “a harmonious and unanimous chorus” (206). It is thus, the task of humanity to use her freedom to receive creation as this song of God’s and to “sing” in harmony with it by uniting herself to the One who has gifted it to her in the gift of the sacraments.
* the angels – which Bouyer gives a fantastic treatment of, which we unfortunately will not get to here!
