Some Examples

We can trace back the tendency I am talking about to artists and writers of earlier centuries, who may well not have actually used the term ‘sacrament’ in this context. Just to give two examples from nineteenth-century poetry, one thinks of Wordsworth's ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey …’:

Or there is Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem ‘God's Grandeur’, which begins:

Hopkins' younger Jesuit colleague George Tyrrell referred to the idea that the spiritual can be conveyed through the material as ‘the sacramental principle’.Footnote ³

Turning now to recent works in theological aesthetics, I will mention three writers, of whom the first, Michael Mayne, is writing for a popular audience. He thinks that the whole world is sacramental, and tells us ‘Not only does God like it [matter] but he clothes himself in it. It is one of his languages.’ Hence the starting-point of spirituality is not a striving after another world, but a ‘deepening awareness of the true nature of this world and our place within it.’Footnote ⁴ But this requires attention, especially to the beauty of the world, and a new way of seeing, inspired by the Holy Spirit; he quotes the visionary painter Samuel Palmer (1805–81), who wrote during his early period at Shoreham, ‘I must paint the hills so as to give us promise that the country behind them is paradise.’Footnote ⁵

We find a much more developed version of such a line of thought in David Brown's recent work. In an earlier essay he and Ann Loades wrote that sacred art can act sacramentally ‘pointing beyond itself to another order of reality’, without constantly needing to be mediated through appeal to Scripture or Church teaching.Footnote ⁶ In his book God and Enchantment of Place Footnote ⁷ he goes far beyond this appeal to sacred art: he discusses secular art, especially landscape paintings of different types, as well; and also the natural world, architecture (both generally, and churches, temples, and mosques), places like homes and cities, gardens, and sport. The last of these is discussed in order to make a link with Brown's next book, which will deal with the sacramentality of the human body (a topic discussed in much recent Catholic theology of marriage).

In all the areas I have mentioned Brown thinks that there may be ‘the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through the material’ (p. 30), for ‘God can come sacramentally close to his world and vouchsafe experiences of himself through the material’ (p. 88). The fact that God is omnipresent does not mean that His presence can be felt everywhere equally (p. 386). Sometimes too we may be more conscious of His immanence than His transcendence, and vice versa (p. 84).

Brown's aim in his book is to recover ‘enchantment’ by reinvigorating our wider sense of the sacramental, and thereby recovering large areas of human experience neglected by religion. In his references to enchantment he is of course crossing swords with Max Weber, who said famously that the modern world is disenchanted. By this Weber meant not so much that people are disenchanted as that the world has lost its enchantment – the German term ‘Entzauberung’ is poorly translated as ‘disenchantment’, for it means something more like ‘losing its magic’. But Brown is also criticizing both Catholicism and Protestantism: the former for narrowing down the concept of sacramentality to the seven defined sacraments, and the latter for giving insufficient attention to sacramentality, in both its narrower and wider senses (unfortunately Orthodoxy does not get much attention, apart from a discussion of icons).

Brown too sees the whole world as sacramental (p. 350), and he regards his enterprise as a kind of natural religion (pp. 8–9,411), or even a new form of natural theology (p. 151). He is starting from the world, rather than from the historical Jesus (p. 410), or, as his earlier remark indicates, from Scripture or Church teaching. ‘World’ for him includes both nature and culture, i.e. both natural and humanly structured material (p. 25). Writing of the Spanish architect Gaudi and his unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Brown commends him for helping people to find God in park, house, and church alike, ‘a truly sacramental vision, with his architecture an extension of nature as God's creation’ (p. 312).

Because of this aim, Brown says fairly little about the theology of the sacraments in the narrow sense, though there is an important section in Chapter 1 in which he points out, correctly, that the term ‘sacrament’ had quite a fluid use in Christianity for several centuries (pp. 25–33), e.g. it is used of a church in the prayer Locus Iste, for the dedication of churches. Thus it was not until the twelfth century that Peter Lombard narrowed down the number of sacraments to seven, a teaching which was officially defined in the following century at the Council of Lyons (1274), and later confirmed by the Council of Trent (1546–63) in response to the Protestant Reformers.

Brown points out too that Christianity teaches that human beings are made in God's image, and that it has had a long history of seeing the world as God's ‘second book’ (p. 33). He does not give any examples of the latter belief, but he could have instanced St Antony of Egypt who according to Evagrius, answered a philosopher who asked him how he could endure his long solitude without the consolation of books, ‘My book is the nature of created things, which is present for me to read when I will the words of God’;Footnote ⁸ or Hugh of St Victor, who wrote ‘the whole sensual world is, as it were, a book written by the finger of God’,Footnote ⁹ or John Keble who said in his poem for Septuagesima Sunday in The Christian Year:

The trouble with this analogy, however, is that it risks eliding the difference between God's words and His other signs. Now one result of Brown's relative neglect of sacramental theology as such is that he says fairly little about one of its constitutive concepts, that of a sign, and about the variety of signs, though he appeals to notions like reflection, representation, and symbolism, e.g. that of light (pp. 33, 124–6, 249, 288). Also, although he appeals to beauty on occasion, e.g. with reference to churches (p. 300), again he says relatively little about this fundamental concept.

I will return later to these omissions. But now I want to go on to my third writer, David Jones, who, like Brown, starts from the world, rather than from Scripture or Church tradition, but who makes more of a link with sacramental theology. Jones (1895–1974) is perhaps best known today for his paintings and his poetry, but he also wrote on issues touching on theology and art (like Eric Gill, with whom he worked for a time). He maintained that any understanding of the sacraments depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, which he thought had been lost to a great extent in the modern world. As he puts it, ‘People speak of sacraments with a capital ‘S’ without seeming to notice that sign and sacrament with a small 's’ are everywhere eroded and in some contexts non-existent’, because, he thinks, through the growth of technology we tend to take things at their face-value – though he remarks that one cannot remain at this level all the time, for man is a sign-maker by nature. The creative artist's task, he says, is to ‘make radiant “particular facts” so that they become intimations of immortality, or … of some otherness of some sort.’Footnote ¹⁰

Jones does not confine the concept of sacrament to the context of ritual, because that would be a restriction on its applicability. In a crucial essay ‘Art and Sacrament’, written in 1955,Footnote ¹¹ he defines human beings, unlike beasts and angels, as both sign-making and sacramental animals. Now signs must be significant of something, hence of some ‘reality’– Jones thinks ultimately of something sacred. Here he is going upwards, as it were, from human making to God; and he is assuming a distinctive religious anthropology. But he is also concerned with the downward movement, from God to the world, and this is more relevant to our present concern, the sacraments. At the end of his essay he quotes Maurice de la Taille, as saying of Christ on Maundy Thursday that ‘He placed himself in the order of signs’. Now this divine condescension presupposes an already existent world of signs – or in his parlance again, sacraments with a big ‘S’ presuppose a world of sacraments with a small 's’ (though Jones thinks that the latter world is already reaching out in some way to the sacred).

Like Brown, Jones is giving us a kind of natural theology, in that he is starting from the world – which is for him a world of signs, especially art and other forms of making. So in a sense he is making sacraments with a large ‘S’ parasitic on something else: for we will not understand the former unless we already have some grasp of signs and sign-making in general.

Sacraments as Effective Signs

Now let me move on and contrast the wider sense of sacramentality, which I have just explored briefly, with the narrower one found in traditional sacramental theology. In Catholic theology a sacrament is defined as an effective sign, i.e. a sign that not only signifies, but also effects what it signifies, especially by sanctifying. Thus St Thomas Aquinas states that the sacraments are not only liturgically instructive, like a catechism, but that they also ‘cause as well as signify’ by conveying grace (On Truth 27:4). The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England convey basically the same idea in defining sacraments not only as ‘badges or tokens of our profession’, but also

Calvin expresses many disagreements with the Catholic theology of the sacraments, but he too comes out with the same general account when he defines a sacrament as ‘an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith …’(Inst.IV. xiv.1). Although he accuses the Council of Trent of having a magical view of the sacraments in its teaching that they justify and confer grace (Inst.IV.xiv.14), he too still uses causal language, in the definition just quoted (‘sealing’, and ‘sustaining’), and later on when he writes of sacraments being effective through the power of the Holy Spirit, of their ‘nourishing’ faith, and of their being effective is so far as their ministry helps to foster, confirm, and increase the knowledge of Christ in us (Inst.IV.xiv.9,12,16). He differs from Trent, he thinks, in emphasizing the need for true faith here, and also, as we shall see, by stressing the role of word in sacrament.

We have, therefore, two things to consider: what is a sign here, and how can it effect something? But because of what Calvin says (though not only because of this), we need to consider a third one, the role here of words, which are united with signs (of course words too are signs of a kind).

The signs operative in the two central sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist are obviously the uses of water, oil, bread, and wine. In the case of Penance or Reconciliation the only visible sign is the priest's making the Sign of the Cross over the penitent as he says the words of absolution. Of course this sign is used in many contexts in Catholic and Orthodox sacraments and elsewhere, and it is an example of what is called a ‘sacramental’ (a category that the Orthodox Churches also extend to icons, which have a liturgical use for them, unlike paintings in Western Churches, both Catholic and Protestant). But it is the words that I want to focus on now, ‘I absolve thee from thy sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’ I think that these words are an example of what J.L.Austin called a ‘performative utterance’, by which he meant a use of language in which we do something with our words as well as saying something, e.g. betting, congratulating, or making a promise. He specifically mentioned the words ‘I do’, which he thought (incorrectly) were used in the marriage service, so performatives would also include sacramental promises and vows. He also included apologizing, so I think one could also extend the idea to confessing one's sins.Footnote ¹²

Not all uses of language in the liturgy are performative, of course, but the concept is important because it gives us a way of approach to the second aspect of sacraments, their effectiveness. As both the term and the title of his book (How to Do Things with Words) indicate, Austin is concerned with language which performs or effects things.Footnote ¹³

Of course, other signs besides words can be performative or effective. Writers on sacramental theology commonly give the parallels of kissing or shaking hands. The latter may mark an introduction, a greeting, an agreement, a reconciliation, or the liturgical act of the Kiss of Peace. It is the participants' intention, their words, and context that tell us what the gesture signifies. Of course there can be misunderstandings and what Austin called ‘infelicities’: Judas' kiss was a betrayal, not a greeting; and, to cite a recent example at Pope John Paul II's funeral in 2005, Prince Charles' shaking of Robert Mugabe's hand was not, as some journalists assumed, a social gaffe or a diplomatic error, occasioned by his being taken by surprise, but a liturgical act.

Ranging further afield, we can find other examples of signs effecting things. A Roman emperor's gesture of thumbs up or down could seal a gladiator's fate; and traffic can be controlled by a policeman's gestures, by traffic lights, in which different colours indicate what is to be done, or by verbal signs (especially on a motorway).

In appealing to Austin's concept of performative utterances, I have also anticipated the third aspect of sacraments we must examine, that of words. Calvin emphasized the role of words in sacraments in general, because the latter presuppose God's promises and the Church's preaching, and also because they help us to understand what the visible signs mean and give them their power. Thus if I only silently poured water over someone, this would not constitute a baptism but would simply puzzle people (Inst. IV.xiv.3–4; of course Catholic theology does not disagree – see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a.60.6–7, building on St Augustine, on the importance of words here).

The sacraments are not the only religious context in which words and signs accompany each other. In the Hebrew Bible the most common function of miracles is to identify claimed instances of God's speaking. Thus Gideon prays to God ‘Give me a sign that it is you who speak to me’ after an angel has appeared to him with a message from God, and then sees the food that he has left on a rock suddenly consumed by fire; and later he treats a fleece in a similar way (Judges 6:17, 36–40). Likewise, Hezekiah is promised that the extraordinary movement of the sun will be a sign that God will fulfil His promises (Isa.38:4–8). In the New Testament the most commonly used term for miracle is semeion (sign). The Fourth Gospel depicts the Jews as asking Jesus ‘What sign will you give us that we should believe in you?’ (Jn.6:30), while the Acts of the Apostles describes St Peter as preaching that ‘Jesus … was a man commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you’(2:22). In such cases the sign is an extraordinary event. But more ordinary events are sometimes regarded by religious believers as providential signs: when people have to take important decisions about, say, a change of job, and are uncertain about what to do, they may pray that God will give them guidance through events, e.g. through a coincidence or a dream. Of course there is always the danger of self-deception in such cases, hence the need for discernment: we require procedures for identifying something as a divine sign and also for reading it aright. After all, there are often difficulties in identifying and interpreting ordinary human signs. But in the case of God these problems are magnified, because He is bodiless, and so His actions differ from human ones. Moreover, because He is believed to be, as Creator, responsible in some sense for all events, in that He at least permits them, His providential signs must be distinguished somehow from other events, e.g. in terms of their context and purpose.

Signs like miracles and providences, however, are not regarded as sacramental signs. Calvin distinguishes signs like the rainbow and Gideon's fleece from the sacraments of the Church, whilst allowing nevertheless that the former are cases of a wider use of the term ‘sacrament’ (Inst.IV.xiv.18–19). Now Brown and others are using the term in a wider sense too. So now the question arises of how their use of the term measures up to its narrower use, referring to the Church's sacraments.

Aesthetic Uses

We have found so far that there are three aspects of sacraments to be considered: signs, effectiveness, and words. How does this analysis apply to the aesthetic uses? And are there other things that we should also consider, like beauty or the fallenness of the world?

In the case of the first aspect, we have to reckon with a great variety of things if we are to include the idea of sign in our definition of the wider sacramentality of the world. As St Augustine says, ‘God works the sensible and visible things which He wills in order to signify and manifest Himself in them’ (De Trin. III.iv.10). We have to face also the question of how we read the signs correctly.

The variety of signs includes, besides words and pictures, signs by resemblance or by association, like footprints, and purely conventional ones, e.g. gestures. The first modern philosopher to distinguish between the different kinds of signs, C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), proposed as his main classification a threefold one: likenesses or ‘icons’, indices (e.g. a barometer), and symbols.Footnote ¹⁴ This classification cuts across Brown's distinction between natural phenomena and human artefacts: a likeness, for instance, can exist both in nature and in a human creation. Looking more to our present concern, aesthetic signs, in his book Languages of Art Nelson Goodman makes a distinction between likenesses and linguistic signs; or rather, in his parlance, between ‘resemblances’ and ‘representations’; he construes the latter category very widely, for it includes maps, models, paintings and so forth, as well as language).Footnote ¹⁵

Both Peirce and Goodman list likenesses or resemblances first; and historically this category has been central to the claim that the world is sacramental in some wider sense. Usually that claim is dependent on a doctrine of Creation, and on the belief that agents act or create in accordance with their own nature. Plato, for example, in his creation myth in the Timaeus says that the Demiurge [Workman or Creator] being free of jealousy, desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be (29E).

Of course, there is also a long tradition which emphasizes God's transcendence, and hence stresses the difference between Him and creation more than the likeness (in a parallel way, there is a tradition which reveals a similar reluctance to use human language of a transcendent God, because of the risk of idolatry, and which insists that human words are inadequate to describe God and that here we are ‘thrusting against the limits of language’, as Wittgenstein put it, and so we have to resort to metaphor and analogical language). Isaiah, for instance, depicts God as saying, ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (55:9), and ‘To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me that we may be alike?’(46:5; cf.40:18). But there are more Biblical texts that stress the likeness than ones that stress the unlikeness,Footnote ¹⁶ and this is not surprising, considering the centrality of the beliefs in Creation and the Incarnation, both of which are concerned with God's relationship to the world. Thus we are told that we are created in the image and likeness of God (Gen.1:26–8; 9:6), a daring claim, for, as Aidan Nichols remarks, it gives to human beings the power of divine disclosure which, in a pagan culture, was attached to the image of the god.Footnote ¹⁷ We are told to imitate God in loving widows, orphans, and strangers (Dt.10:18f.), forgiving offenders and showing mercy (Matt.6:12,14f.; Lk.6:36). I am told by Archbishop Rowan Williams that the word for saint in Old Slavonic is ‘like’[sc. God].

In the New Testament an even bolder idea is introduced, that of sharing in the divine nature (II Pet.1:4). But here a new factor has been introduced: Christ is regarded as a middle term between God and the human race. Since he is the image and perfect copy of God (II Cor.4:4; Col.1:15; Heb.1:3), it is by imitating him that we become God-like, and it is by his redemptive work and through the Holy Spirit that whatever likeness to God was lost at the Fall can be restored. Hence it has become common in modern theology to describe Christ as a sacrament. Karl Barth, for instance, says that Christ's humanity is ‘the first sacrament’ (Church Dogmatics, II.i., p. 54), whilst Karl Rahner describes the incarnate Son as being the ‘revelatory symbol’ of the Father.Footnote ¹⁸ The latter derives his whole sacramental theology from this position, using the Church as the middle term: for he goes on to say that the Church is the persisting presence of the Incarnate Logos in space and time, and thus the ‘primary sacrament’, and that particular sacraments make concrete and actual for the life of the individual the reality of the Church.Footnote ¹⁹ Rahner's approach is typical of much modern Catholic sacramental theology. Edward Schillebeeckx, for example, also proceeds by first defining Christ as the primordial sacrament, and then goes on to describe the seven sacraments as Christ's actions through the Church, whereby the essence of the latter expresses itself.Footnote ²⁰ Schillebeeckx also mentions the saints as having a sacramental role, as visible grace present in the world.Footnote ²¹

The examples I have just given are all ones taken from human life; and in the last case, of how people can become, through the mediation of Christ the image of God, signs-through-likeness of God. But to get back to Mayne, Brown, and Jones, what of the natural world, not to mention human artefacts: how can they be signs-through-likeness?

The most popular traditional answer to this question has been in terms of beauty. Many theologians have described God as beautiful, indeed in a few cases as beauty itself, as have some artists, and I suspect that many ordinary people today would still favour this approach: certainly in the case of natural beauty, and to a lesser extent in that of the arts (of course there are many other reasons for commending works of art or literature besides their beauty). As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it, ‘the cosmos is experienced as the representation and manifestation of the hidden transcendent beauty of God.’Footnote ²² He is, in this quotation, writing of Greek thought from Plato to Plotinus; and it is true that early Christian thought was much influenced by the former, especially the famous ‘ladder of beauty’ in his Symposium, where Diotima is depicted as telling Socrates that we should mount from an appreciation of beautiful bodies in the world to more abstract forms of beauty, like beautiful souls or laws, to beauty itself (210–11). But there are many passages in the Bible that have been equally influential, both ones that speak of God's glory, and ones, especially in the Psalms, that ascribe something like beauty to God or to places and things associated with Him.Footnote ²³

On the whole this line of thought has not been popular in modern Christian theology. There are, however, a few outstanding exceptions besides von Balthasar: Jonathan Edwards, some of the Russian émigrés of the early twentieth century, especially Paul Evdokimov, and above all Simone Weil. The last of these writers describes beauty as ‘the attribute of God under which we see him’Footnote ²⁴, as Christ's ‘tender smile for us coming through matter’Footnote ²⁵, and even as an incarnation of God, come down to earth to save us.Footnote ²⁶ She describes, too, the contact of the true artist with the beauty of the world as being of the nature of a sacrament.Footnote ²⁷

The penultimate quotation echoes Dostoevsky's famous statement in The Idiot that beauty will save the world, and it take us on to the second aspect of sacraments, namely effectiveness, providing a very bold answer to an obvious question raised by the parallel made between the sacraments of the Church and the wider sacramentality of things. The former are effective, as we have seen, in so far as they convey grace and sanctify. But how is the ‘sacramental world’, or particular aspects of it like landscapes or paintings, effective? Or is this a silly question, occasioned by pressing the parallel too far? After all, the sacraments of the Church are actions, like pouring water, which are believed to have specific aims and effects, like freeing from Original Sin, admitting a child into the Church, or forgiving and healing, whereas landscapes, buildings, and so forth are not actions but relatively stable parts of the furniture of the universe.

Writers like Brown, however, have an answer to this obvious question, in terms of mediating God's presence. Thus Brown, as we have seen, writes in general of ‘the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through the material’ (p. 30), and later tells us, more specifically, ‘Buildings can and do communicate a mediated divine presence …’(p. 347; cf. p. 367). He writes too of seeing the world and what we do with it as ‘an intelligible reflection of a divine mind expressing itself’ (p. 288, an idea which he also finds in the Qu'ran – cf. p. 366). So presumably the signs are effective in so far as they communicate and express things successfully in the ways described. Thus a landscape can teach us things: ‘consider the lilies of the field … .’ Similarly, a work of art can change people: Mendelssohn wrote to Schumann about one of Bach's chorale preludes, ‘if life were to deprive you of hope and faith, this one chorale would bring it all back to you.’Footnote ²⁸ One might press the point here and argue that it is God who is acting through the things Brown mentions, hence they are effective.

This seems quite a good answer, in principle. But why do so many people misread the signs? As Thomas Traherne wrote in his Centuries‘The word is a mirror of Infinit Beauty, yet No Man sees it’ (i.31). Of course, if any sign can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, then presumably this includes the sacraments as well: we have seen how those journalists who criticized Prince Charles’ shaking hands with Robert Mugabe misunderstood one part of the Mass, the Kiss of Peace. Signs are supposed to tell us things, but to do so they must be perceived and understood. As Mayne indicates, attention is needed; and perhaps training of a sort, in order to ‘take part’.

In the case of the sacraments of the Church there is a third factor to be considered, namely words: as we have seen, they accompany actions like pouring water, consecrating bread and wine, and so forth, and thereby they both indicate what is being done and, as performative utterances, are part of the action. They are constitutive of the sacraments, because they are united with the other signs (again see Aquinas, S.T. 3a.60.6–7).

Now what corresponds to words in the case of the wider sacramentality of things? We are left with a serious problem here, for the parallel seems to break down, in that we lack anything corresponding to e.g. the baptismal formulae or the words of the Eucharist (Brown promises us, on p. 10, that he will deal with the sacramentality of words in his next volume). Sometimes we may be able to supply suitable words ourselves. Thus I may look in wonder at the night sky and exclaim with the Psalmist ‘The heavens declare the glory of the Lord’ (Ps.19:1). Or, in the case of a work of art, the artist might supply the words for us. Thus Brown points out that Samuel Palmer reinforced the message of his drawing Valley Thick with Corn with a quotation from Psalm 65 placed on the original mount, ‘Thou crownest the year with thy goodness … the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.’(p. 122). He goes on to quote Palmer's biographer, R.Lister, as writing of another similar work, Harvest under a Crescent Moon, ‘the golden seas of corn seem sacramental, and the crescent moon holds its darker area of earthshine like a monstrance holding a Host’, and remarks tartly that ‘such verbal comments are scarcely necessary’, for here, he says, ‘a sense of sacramental presence infusing the natural world and uniting nature and humanity as one’ is obvious (p. 122). This is so, I think, because Palmer is striving for representation in his art, even if of idealized or transient states. It is because he was successful in this that we do not usually need words to explain his paintings. But when we are dealing with some other kinds of signs, like symbols, verbal comments may be necessary, though they play a different role from the words of the Church's sacraments.