Not Merely Rites of Passage
“You're talking to a group of parents on the sacraments of the Church. Many of them have been through Catholic school for years. They think they know everything about the sacraments. In fact, many think they're just pleasant rites of passage. Tell them a story about what the sacraments really are based on your reading of Bouyer's Cosmos.” (This post is one of a series of six assignments in fulfillment of a sacramental theology course at the University of Notre Dame.)
In fairness to the parents, there is a sense in which the sacraments are indeed akin to “rites of passage” within the Church, because the sacraments have an analogous correspondence to the stages of human life. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The seven sacraments touch all the stages and all the important moments of Christian life: they give birth and increase, healing and mission to the Christian's life of faith. There is thus a certain resemblance between the stages of natural life and the stages of the spiritual life” (1210, cf. St. Thomas Aquinas ST III.65.3).
However, contrary to our imaginary parent’s perception that the sacraments are merely ecclesiastical rites of passage, Fr. Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos shows us the sweeping scale and majestic grandeur of what really goes on behind and beneath the outward appearances of the sacramental matter of water or oil or bread. Bouyer constructs his insights on the metaphysical “inner workings” of the sacraments by starting with the life of the Blessed Trinity; progressing through the ceaseless praises sung by the angels; and terminating in the creation, fall, and (ongoing!) redemption of mankind. Here I will treat each of these three points in turn.
The Blessed Trinity in Relation to the Sacraments
After tracing the history of the pagan world’s attempts to understand the existence and nature of God without the aid of divine revelation, and even the mis-construal of that revelation in the early heresies combatted by the Church, Bouyer settles approvingly on St. Athanasius of Alexandria’s (c. 297-373) formulation of the Trinitarian mystery:
To start with, St. Athanasius seems to have been the first one to realize this formally, or in any case to state it expressly: though God is one, he yet encompasses, both in his relationship to the world and within himself absolutely, something which, while not multiplicity, cannot be reduced to mere unity as we understand it. (184)
Fundamentally, it is this very divine life, the life of the community of Persons in the Godhead, that the sacraments exist to initiate us into. By nature, we human beings participate in human society, and “it is the relationships between men which makes humanity a natural image of the Trinity” (185, italics mine). But by grace—viz., by means of the sacraments of the Church!—mankind can participate not only in the natural life of human society, but in “the Church (humanity’s supernatural society)…[which elevates] each member to a participation in the divine life (i.e., the trinitarian life)” (ibid.).
And the divine life shared among the persons of the Godhead is nothing other than the eternal exchange of Love itself (cf. 1 John 4:8). Or, as Bouyer says:
Because this plenitude is that of love, and because the love unfolding in the life of the Trinity is pure gift and pure gratuitousness, there is nothing to prevent God from being the creator of other beings…Having created them out of pure love…he knows them in the biblical sense of the word, i.e., he takes an interest in them, delights in them, [and] takes pleasure in their welfare and happiness, as no other conceivable lover would or could do for the beloved. (187)
The God who is Love, though “infinitely perfect and blessed in himself” (CCC 1), did in fact freely choose to create other beings, among which are the angels, to whom we turn next.
The Angels in Relation to the Sacraments
“According to Scripture and tradition,” Bouyer reminds us, “the physical world, i.e. nature, is much more than a mere material universe. In fact, its material aspect is but the envelope, the external clothing of a wholly spiritual world” (195). And whereas “for Plato, the invisible world was one of ideas…the invisible world Christians believe in is one of persons” (196). These incorporeal, created, spiritual personages are what we call angels.
In this chapter (XIX) of Cosmos, Bouyer uses his exposition of the angelic world to draw readers into contemplation of the “cosmic liturgy,” in which “through sacramental participation in the Savior’s glorifying cross, mankind thus joins the faithful angels, themselves forever celebrating, from the first moment of creation, the Ancient of days” (200, 202; cf. Daniel 7).
Since Cosmos is, strictly speaking, neither a work of sacramental theology per se nor a manual of popular piety or devotion, it leaves unasked and unanswered many speculative questions on the angels that I would have been more interested to see the author reflect upon. For example, there is a pious sentiment in the Church that all of the angels and saints are in fact present (so to speak, cf. ST I.52.1) at every Mass, since it is the very same sacrifice of “the Savior’s glorifying cross” that is being re-presented in an unbloody manner in the Eucharistic liturgy. What might Bouyer have had to say about this? How might the angels assist us in offering our participation at Mass as a sacrifice of praise to the triune God? How could they dispose us to receive the manifold graces that Christ offers us by means of his substantial presence in the Eucharist? and so on.
Mankind in Relation to the Sacraments
So having now descended from the rarified reality of God’s inner life, through the hallowed halls of the choirs of angels, we come to find our feet firmly planted in our own, embodied experience of existence and sin and redemption and hope. Bouyer, following a particular strain of patristic thought, favors the view that mankind was intended to be a “replacement” of sorts for the cadre of fallen angels. He writes:
In this view, which seems solidly based on Scripture, man is, by virtue of his creation and its conditions, a first potential redeemer of the world. If he had been faithful to the call of God, who intended him to fill the place left by the prevaricator, his faithfulness would have erased the initial transgression. (213)
However, as the string of subjunctive pluperfects would indicate, mankind did not persevere in this state of original righteousness. Therefore, “biblical teaching, from Genesis to the book of Revelation, clearly assumes and unequivocally asserts that man—each individual man, as well as human society as such—bears a share of responsibility for the Fall” (207).
Luckily for fallen mankind, though none of this came as a surprise to God, who “when the fullness of time had come, sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4). The eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity incarnate as Jesus Christ, came to deliver us from our slavery to sin and death by his own life, death, and resurrection from the dead. This death to sin and resurrection as a new creation is accomplished in the sacrament of Baptism that Christ instituted (cf. John 3:5, Matthew 28:19), regained in the sacrament of Reconciliation after it is lost by sin (cf. John 20:21-23), sealed and strengthened by the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of Confirmation (cf. Acts 8:15-17), and ordered toward the reception of Christ himself in the Most Holy Eucharist (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23-24, et al.).
Conclusion
Far from being merely rites of passage, the sacraments that a young person receives have ramifications not only for their own soul, but ramifications that reverberate through all of the “layers” of reality, involving not only the rest of “humanity’s supernatural society” the Church, but even the angels in heaven and the eternal exchange of love and life that subsists within God himself. As Bouyer says:
Through baptism and faith, [Christ] makes [the recipients of the sacraments] part of himself, conforming them to the mystery of his death and resurrection. In the Eucharist…he assimilates them so completely to the temple of his own body, that their bodies also become even now “the Temple of the Spirit.” [And] when this mystical body…reaches its cosmic fullness, when the last of the elect have been absorbed and conformed to it, then Christ will have reached maturity in all his members, and his own Parousia [the Second Coming[, the event toward which this entire growth had been straining, will finally take place. (230)