How the Seven Sacraments “Christianize” Us

Rogier van der Weyden's Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (c. 1450)

In this month of July, dedicated to the mystery of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, I wish to reflect on sacramental realism. For indeed the sacraments are as real, as tangible, as powerful, as cleansing, as the very lifeblood of the Savior pouring forth from His body, nailed to the Cross and opened with a lance.

For Aquinas the most basic function of the sacraments is to place man in vital contact with the crucified and risen Lord [1]; they are, in the words of Romanus Cessario, “graced instruments for restoring the image of God” [2] through assimilation to God’s Son, who is the Father’s perfect image and man’s formative exemplar. By virtue of the God-man’s sacrifice, each sacrament has power to originate, deepen, or repair a direct relationship between man and God, a communion of like-minded friends having a shared beatitude for its goal.

Each sacrament configures one to Christ in a specific way, according to a certain grace in the soul of Christ, connected with His deeds and sufferings on earth. This reference to the past may be seen in the sacraments as follows:

• The Eucharist brings us into contact with Christ in the state of bloody immolation, though the mode is unbloody. [3]
• Baptism unites us with Christ dying and rising.
• Confirmation unites us with Christ as descended upon by the Holy Spirit.
• Holy Orders fuses the candidate with Christ offering sacrifice.
• Matrimony conjoins spouses to Christ in the act of uniting to himself mankind and the Church.
• When the sick are anointed, it is Christ strengthening those who are struggling, he is the angel who visits them in their Gethsemane.
• The penitent sinner is made one with Christ efficaciously making satisfaction for us — the sinner is nailed to an invisible Cross where the Savior meets him, and breathes out peace upon him. [4]

In every case, it is Christ Himself, in His sacred humanity, in His eternal divinity, who acts directly upon the recipient; it is He who bestows the healing and elevating effects of grace through the sacramental signs administered by others. “The man who baptizes provides only exterior ministry,” writes Thomas, “but it is Christ who baptizes interiorly, who is able to use all men for whatever He wills” (ST III, q. 67, a. 5, ad 1). In another text the point is made quite forcefully:

It is evident that Christ Himself accomplishes all the Church’s sacraments: He it is who baptizes; He it is who forgives sins; He is the true priest, who offered Himself on the altar of the Cross, and by whose power His own Body is consecrated daily on the altar. And yet, because he was not to remain bodily present to all the faithful, He chose ministers, that through them He might give that same Body to the faithful. (SCG IV, ch. 76)

Thus, in and through the seven sacraments, Christians re-live mystically the life Christ lived when He dwelt among us full of grace and truth, and the risen life He is now living forever: we enter into His earthly ministry, His passion and death, His resurrection and ascension.

The sacraments derive their efficacy from the Word-made-flesh; each has its power and operation immediately from Jesus Christ, whose glorified humanity is the inseparable instrument, the predestined channel, through which the divine Word pours out grace into souls. When a human being, properly disposed, receives one of the seven sacraments, he is at that moment in mystical contact with the Person of the Savior, who pours out as much grace as the soul is ready to receive.

This mystical contact attains an incomparable fullness and immediacy in the Eucharist, which both symbolizes and accomplishes the intimate communion of the Savior with the members of his body. Here the sacramental encounter is no mere contact, but the context for an unreserved, mutual gift of self that can attain a unity and fecundity only distantly hinted at in human marriage.

Thomas’s uncompromising sacramental realism is in many ways astonishing. Without denying that they are social, symbolic celebrations for calling to mind important truths, Aquinas holds the sacraments to be, first and foremost, a real participation in Christ’s own actions, sufferings, and glory, for the sake of receiving into one’s being the effect of those actions, the fruit of those sufferings, the vision of that glory. As Gilles Emery phrases it: “They bear the historical event of the Passion of Jesus, whence they procure the fruit of grace in the present moment, while announcing the fulfillment whose seed they possess.” [5] For example, when asking whether a man is freed from all guilt through baptism, Aquinas responds:

Through baptism one is incorporated into Christ’s passion and death, according to Romans 6:8, “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live together with Christ.” From which it is clear that Christ’s passion is communicated to every baptized person as a remedy, as though he himself had suffered and had died. Now Christ’s passion . . . is sufficient satisfaction for all the sins of all men. And so the one who is baptized is freed from the debt of all the punishment due to him for sins, as though he himself had sufficiently satisfied for his own sins. (ST III, q. 69, a. 2, emphasis added)

In baptism the death and resurrection of Christ becomes ours; it becomes our paschal mystery, the origin of a new life with Him. The effect is the same as if we, become unblemished victims, had hung on the Cross; as if we had suffered and died, though guiltless of all crime; as if we had risen again, forever beyond the reach of death and decay.

So much is this the case, believes Thomas, that it even dissolves the obligation of rendering the marriage debt in a certain case:

Now he who goes over to the religious life dies only a spiritual death, not a bodily death; and so, if the marriage be consummated, the husband cannot go over to religious life without his wife’s consent (whereas he can do so prior to there being a carnal joining, when there is only a spiritual joining).  But the one who undergoes baptism is even corporeally buried with Christ in death; and therefore he is freed from paying the marriage debt even after the marriage has been consummated. (In IV Sent. d. 39, q. 1, a. 4, ad 2)

This “as if” is not the als ob of Kantian philosophy — we must behave as if there is a God; we must view nature as if there is teleology; we must approach the beautiful as if beauty is an objective trait.  It is the mystical “as if” that means: we have really done and suffered these things because we have been joined, even identified, with the One who really did and suffered them. Being true man, Christ could act and undergo as a creature acts and undergoes; being true God, he can, in the power of the Spirit, make his accomplishments ours.  The phrase “as if” merely preserves the reverent distance of participant to source.

This “incorporation,” begun at baptism, is perfected by a man’s being united in the power of the Spirit to the Body of Christ — engrafted into His Mystical Body by way of His glorified Body shared in the Eucharist — that we may no longer live for ourselves, but for Him. The Eucharist is “the consummation of spiritual life, and the end of all the sacraments” (ST III, q. 73, a. 3), containing substantially the common spiritual good of the whole Church. It is “the sacrament of Christ’s passion in so far as a man is perfected in union with the Christ-who-suffered” (ST III, q. 73, a. 3, ad 3). [6]

The sacraments in fact simply Christianize us. Contrary to the heresy of Karl Rahner, no soul is “naturally” or “anonymously” Christian, as if one could be a Christian and not even know it. We need to receive, in faith, the gift of Christ’s life, His grace, His charity. The sacraments find us more or less pagan, more or less self-centered, and they evangelize and convert us to be centered on Christ, to have our center in Him. This means that a sacramental life, so far as the recipient’s experience is concerned, will not consist of satisfying (one might say, flattering) encounters between a well-defined self or subject and a securely-apprehended object. [7] Rather, it will be a mirror, at times bright, at times blurry, in which I am able to glimpse the Face of the One who seeks me out in love, and the unfolding of my life in relation to Him, in union with Him. “Sacraments are proportionate to faith, through which the truth is seen in a mirror and in an enigma” (ST III, q. 80, a. 2, ad 2).

When we come before the Lord at the end of our lives, may He recognize in us the beauty of His own features.

Johannes Hopffe, Distribution of Divine Graces by Means of the Catholic Church and the Sacraments (before 1615)

NOTES

[1] See Joseph J. Sikora, S.J., “Sacraments and Encounter,” in Theological Reflections of a Christian Philosopher (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 213–33.

[2] From his essay “Aquinas on Christian Salvation,” in Aquinas on Doctrine: A Critical Introduction, ed. T. Weinandy, D. Keating, and J. Yocum (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 129. See also the same author’s “The Sacramental Mediation of Divine Friendship and Communion,” Faith & Reason 27 (2002): 7–41.

[3] The Eucharist occupies so unique a place and enjoys such a primacy among the seven sacraments of the New Law that even the very term “sacrament” has to be regarded as analogous, with the Eucharist being the very locus of divinization and communion with the Savior, and the other sacraments streaming out from it and leading back to it.

[4] The phrases in quotation marks are taken from André-Charles Gigon, O.P., De Sacramentis in communi (Fribourg: Typographia Canisiana, 1945).

[5] Gilles Emery, O.P., “The Ecclesial Fruit of the Eucharist,” Nova et Vetera [English] 2 (2004): 43–60.

[6] For more on the Eucharist as containing Christus passus, see my article last week: “‘The Application of the Lord’s Passion to Us’: St Thomas on the Blessed Sacrament.”

[7] The experience, as such, may be empty and dry, or overfull and beyond words — like bodily intimacy, like evanescent recollection. But this is not the crux of the matter. The desire to equate faith or love with a subjective “experience” of God, and the consequent tendency to spurn a God who eludes experience, is one of the chief temptations a Christian has to overcome if he is to get beyond “self-cultivationism” into the maturity of spiritual marriage.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

Two Attitudes toward Ordinary Form Rubrics: Kantian Duty and Aristotelian Epikeia

Over the years at NLM, various authors have published articles concerning how the Ordinary Form might be “enriched” or “improved,” usually by way of adapting or importing practices of the traditional Roman rite. Sometimes this has taken the modest form of recommending that the OF’s own rubrics be actually followed (e.g., on the ad orientem stance, or on the use of Propers), and that a celebrant exercise a well-informed liturgical phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom) in the choice of options. At other times, the proposals have been more comprehensive, as in Fr. Richard Cipolla’s “A Primer for a Tradition-Minded Celebration of the OF Mass.” Such proposals tend to be greeted with two strongly contrasting reactions: a warm welcome from proponents of “mutual enrichment,” or a stern rebuke from those who see them as fomenting disobedience to the new liturgical books and the documents that control their use.

I submit that we can find a way forward in this debate by considering the contrast between the Kantian notion of duty and the Aristotelian notion of epikeia, often translated “equity.”

For Kant, duty is something absolute: in Germanic fashion, one ought never to swerve from the strict provisions of the law. In fact, the only way we can know that we are virtuous is by suppressing any subjective motivation or personal judgment about what is right to do and submitting to the objectivity of legal dictates. In this perspective, there is no room for going beyond the letter of the law to achieve more perfectly the law’s own intention of promoting the common good. If a traffic light or crosswalk signal is red, one must always stop at it, regardless of the circumstances.

For Aristotle, in contrast, formulated laws, as necessary as they are for social life, suffer from the inherent flaw of having been universally framed (as if to embody a timeless and placeless rational perspective), and thus incapable of responding to certain immediate needs. While justice is surely founded on law-abidingness, it is perfected by an additional virtue called epikeia, whereby one judges well of when and how to adapt the law to specific circumstances. Epikeia is the virtue of seeing past the phrasing of the law to the good it intends to safeguard or promote, so that one may do that which will best safeguard or promote that very good — even if at times it involves stepping aside from the literal dictate of the law. Hence, if the traffic light is red, but one has a seriously injured person as a passenger, one looks both ways and then drives straight through the red light to reach the hospital.[1]

In light of this brief sketch, it seems to me that people come at liturgical law and rubrics from one of two positions:

1. The Kantian: “Say the Black, Do the Red.” No more and no less.

2. The Aristotelian: “Say the Black, Do the Red, in accord with the requirements of liturgy and the pattern of tradition.” In other words, you must do and say the things that are directed, and refrain from doing or saying the things that are prohibited, but beyond this there is a wise liberty to practice unity with one’s Catholic tradition, letting it dictate the way the liturgy should be offered. A priest friend described this view as “classical liberal traditionalism.”[2]

(For the sake of completeness, there is a third position one might identify: the Liberal or Progressive. The clergy who espouse it, however well-intentioned they may be, neither consistently say the black nor do the red, but abuse their positions to improvise and make stuff up as they go along — e.g., arbitrarily speaking aloud prayers that are supposed to be silent.)

Now it seems to me that the Kantian position lines up with those who would see themselves as, or whom others would call, “conservatives,” while the Aristotelian view lines up with those who might are more likely to be characterized as “traditionalists,” whatever we may make of these inadequate labels. Each of these views seems to line up with a fundamental commitment. The Kantian values authority and its dictates over all other considerations, including Tradition, which is not regarded as having normative and probative value. The Aristotelian works with multiple criteria, regarding the moral act as a complex of internal and external elements, which include, to be sure, authority and law, but also extend beyond them to natural law, precedent, custom, and discretion in a Benedictine sense. (The progressive, for his part, takes as a first principle the superiority of the future over the past: he assumes the inferiority, crudity, or corruptness of tradition, exalts the value of human science as a guide to original purity and contemporary need, and therefore tends to chafe at, if he does not violently attack, the restraints of former custom and current law.)

The first or Kantian approach suffers from a kind of mechanistic hollowness: one acknowledges a strict duty to an extrinsic principle but makes no room for the intrinsic principle of intelligence to interpret the situation and act appropriately.[3] That this cannot possibly work for the OF is evidenced by the fact that all kinds of decisions have to be made for which there is no provision in the rubrics (unlike in the usus antiquior, where the Church, drawing on the wisdom of centuries, has carefully specified what is to be done, allowing the celebrant to yield himself more freely to the rite in its perfection). This is why Msgr. Elliott’s Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite and Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year are such helpful books — and so hated by liberals. It draws upon the wealth of classical rubrics in order to give more dignity to the OF’s celebration. While it is nowhere near as daring as the Primer published at NLM, it still presupposes the same “classical liberal” attitude of doing what is in line with tradition.

Let me offer a concrete example. Whether the architects of the Novus Ordo disbelieved in transubstantiation or whether they understood the Real Presence in a heretical manner is a moot point; what is beyond dispute is that they suppressed practices that centuries of reverence for the Blessed Sacrament had prompted, and that this suppression has had the effect, in practice, of lessening both the clergy’s awareness of the awesomeness of the sacred mysteries they enact and the people’s faith in the Real Presence. A priest, therefore, possessed of good liturgical sense, understanding why a genuflection should be made immediately after the consecration, why the fingers are thenceforward to be held together, and why, during the ablutions, the fingers should be washed over the chalice with wine and water, will simply do all this as dignum et justum, the right and just thing to do. In this way he is more in keeping with the mind and will of the supreme legislator, who is obligated ex officio to preserve and promote both the liturgical tradition and maximum reverence towards the Body and Blood of Christ. In this way the legislator’s authentic intention is taken up and strengthened, whatever a particular legislator may have been thinking in his human frailty.

All this being said, the Aristotelian approach is advisable for a priest who is steeped in the tradition and thus will know how and when to bring traditional elements to the OF. In contrast, it is dangerous, one might say, for a priest who is operating from a flawed or piecemeal liturgical formation to attempt to apply epikeia, for he may introduce untraditional, unliturgical elements, again with the best of intentions.[4] To put the matter practically, the priest who will be most capable of exercising epikeia in the OF will be the one who is well-versed in the celebration and rubrics of the usus antiquior. Indeed, this was precisely the source of the Primer: its author is a priest who for years has offered both the traditional Mass in all three of its forms (Low, High, and Solemn) and the Ordinary Form within a hermeneutic of continuity.

There is no magisterial document on this “meta-question.” The Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum and other documents say, of course, that the priest must be obedient to the rubrics, and that the faithful have a right to a liturgy that is celebrated according to them, etc., but both the Kantian and Aristotelian approaches already concur on this point. The confusion in the Latin Church today results, at least in part, from the importation of the antinomian culture of the 1960s into the very sanctuary, in the form of an open-ended liturgy with options, inculturations, adaptations, and a vastly impoverished code of rubrics. Whatever may be its social merits or demerits, antinomianism is an unsustainable liturgical philosophy. This is precisely why young clergy are eager for the kind of guidance offered them in Msgr. Elliott’s books and NLM’s Primer.

Ezekiel’s depiction of Israel — “you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred on the day that you were born; and when I passed by you, and saw you weltering in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live, and grow up like a plant of the field’” (Ezek 16:5–6) — might well remind us of the sorry spectacle of a liturgy so much depleted of sacrality, so much in need of growing up and joining the world of actual historical liturgies (if such a reunification is even possible — a theoretical question better left for another occasion). Naturally, clergy and laity who love Catholic tradition, and who are, in one way or another, confined to the use of the Ordinary Form, wish to do something about this problem of the loss of sacredness and the lack of appropriate rites and rubrics. We ought to recognize that there are various plausible and defensible solutions. One of them, as this article has argued, is to Say the Black and Do the Red with an epikeia that avails itself of traditional means by which the Black acquires a fuller resonance and the Red achieves a fuller dignity.

NOTES

[1] See Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, ch. 10, for Aristotle’s most complete treatment of this virtue.

[2] I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek; my actual views on classical liberalism as a socio-political philosophy are well known. Suffice it to say that, following in the line of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, and Leo XIII, I am not a fan of it.

[3] The priest is an instrument or tool, but he is, as Aquinas says, an intelligent tool. That is, the Lord makes use of him according to his own nature as a rational animal.

[4] There are larger theoretical issues here, as well, that go beyond the scope of this article. On the one hand, those who designed the OF presumably wanted to revive some fantasy of a free-wheeling early Church liturgy with ex tempore prayers, but there was no thought of the liturgical formation that would be necessary for such virtuosity. Then, formation itself presupposes a specific liturgical tradition, whereas the OF and its options are eclectic between traditions. How is anyone supposed to know if this (mangled) set of Roman orations goes best with that (bowdlerized) Alexandrian Preface, or this or another chant in Latin, English, or Spanish? Prudent choice makes sense within a stable, coherent structure. This, again, is why the usus antiquior is the only possible guide to stabilizing and harmonizing the usus recentior.

In the Liturgy, Man is Most Active—and Most Receptive

For this feast of St. Pius X on the traditional Roman calendar and St. Gregory the Great on the new calendar (two great pontiffs whose legacies are fittingly thus intertwined), it seemed appropriate to offer a meditation on a fundamental principle of liturgical theology.

Although liturgy is the greatest act of man, it is never an act of man by himself, but always and essentially the action of Christ the High Priest, true God and true man, who allows and enables us to participate in His theandric action, His all-sufficient Sacrifice for the salvation of the world. This being so, liturgy is a peculiar kind of action, one in which man is also most passive, in the sense of being utterly receptive to the gift God wishes to give him, through the hands of the Church.

If we were to fall into a way of thinking about the liturgy as a kind of workshop, an evolving sphere of self-expression, a communal celebration of the here and now, then we would be truly guilty of Pelagianism. We would be making ourselves the central agents or actors—activists instead of imitators of the Virgin Mary who received the angel’s greeting, gave her consent to the divine initiative, and conceived by the Holy Spirit to bring forth the ultimate gift to mankind: the Son of God, in flesh and blood. The liturgy and its music have and must have this Marian dimension of receptivity, a virginal intention to stay untainted by the profane world and a faithful mothering of the Word-made-flesh.

One important expression of our Marian receptivity is that we receive the liturgy from the Church and her Tradition, we do not create it, and we follow her rubrics and rules, not our own. Although duty has been given a bad name by Immanuel Kant, rightly understood it remains a fundamental reality of Christian life. It is our duty, as Catholics, to follow the Church’s doctrine and discipline concerning the liturgy (especially the Mass). For example, when it comes to sacred music for the Ordinary Form, we must follow the full and clear teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the General Instruction on the Roman Missal, and other documents such as Sacramentum Caritatis that have made clear how we should be singing the Ordinary and the Propers, giving Gregorian chant the foremost place in the repertoire. There are norms, rules, standards, because the public worship of the Church does not belong to us, it belongs to her Master, the Lord she worships.

Recently I read this moving passage from Martin Mosebach’s endlessly insightful Heresy of Formlessness:

Many people regard the rubrics as the most distinctive—and most problematical—feature of the old Missal. . . . . Rubricism stands for a liturgy where all subjectivism, all charismatic enthusiasm, all creative inventiveness has been condemned to silence. . . . Public prayer, not the prayer of the individual but of the Church’s whole Mystical Body, possessed a binding quality that, in an atmosphere of emancipation from all pressure whatsoever, could be felt as a kind of dictatorship. Now, however, after more than a century of the destruction of forms in art, literature, architecture, politics, and religion, too, people are generally beginning to realize that loss of form—almost always—implies loss of content. . . . Formerly, seminarians learned rubrics so well they could perform them in their sleep. Just as pianists have to practice hard to acquire some technique that is initially a pure torture, but ultimately sounds like free improvisation, experienced celebrants used to move to and fro at the altar with consummate poise; the whole action poured forth as if from a single mold. These celebrants were not hemmed in by armor-plated rubrics, as it were: they floated on them as if on clouds.

Along the same lines, Ryan Topping, in his book Rebuilding Catholic Culture, has this to say about rubrics:

If you no longer see yourself as the servant of a tradition, but as its master, no longer believe that the rubrics veil a mystery, that the soul requires truth to be wrapped in the garment of beauty, then reasonably you are likely to treat the Mass more as a gathering of friends than as a sacrifice of God.

Is this not precisely what has happened, in spite of the noble witness and teaching of Pope Saint Pius X and many of his holy successors?  There is such sanity and sanctity in these words of Dom Mark Kirby of Silverstream Priory:

To begin with the liturgy is not to set about tinkering with it; it is to submit to it, as it is. To begin with God is not to engage in a critical analysis of theology; it is to fall prostrate saying, “The Lord he is God, the Lord he is God” (1 Kings 18:39). To begin with adoration is, in the inspired words of the Cherubic Hymn of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, “to lay aside all earthly cares” in homage to “the King of Kings who comes escorted invisibly by Angelic hosts.” 

It almost sounds like an examination of conscience that we might pursue: do we truly begin with liturgy as something first, something that preexists us and will continue long after we are gone, rather than something we master, manufacture, produce, shape at will? Do we submit to the liturgy, not as we think it should be for “modern man,” but as it has come down to us from holy tradition, passing relatively unchanged through centuries of doubt, dismay, and disaster like a strong ship sailing over the churning waves of a stormy sea?  Is our most characteristic action to fall prostrate before the mystery and majesty of God as He deigns to reveal Himself in the ritual words, actions, and signs that He has left among us?

Traditionalists might have a tendency to think that such questions need not be put to them, as if they are automatically “covered” by their faithful adherence to traditional forms. I think this is an incorrect and perhaps spiritually dangerous assumption. We, too, need to be sure that we are following the full teaching of Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to our offering of public worship. For example, in our zeal to set aside a widely prevalent superficial understanding of active participation, are we zealous to embrace and promote Saint Pius X’s clarion call for the active participation of the people in the singing of the Gregorian chants of the Ordinary of the Mass and the responses that belong to them in a High Mass? Are we careful, as we sift the good results of the liturgical movement from the bad, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Would St. Pius X, Pius XII, and John XXIII, among others, recognize us as their children, as the ones who have finally taken their magisterium to heart and made it shine forth more brightly in the world, for the spread of the light of Christ?

St. Pius X and St. Gregory the Great, pray for us.