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by John Wijngaards
- Why sacramental signs?
- How are sacraments related to Christ?
- Theological terms associated with
‘sacrament’
- Ordination as a sacrament
- Sacramental ordination and the
community
- Is talking of sacraments in the Early Church an
‘anachronism’?
There is more to life than just chemistry and physics. God is the
tremendous mystery hidden behind everything we can see, hear and touch. The
people and things that surround us can become symbols of that deeper
all-pervasive presence. Then they become windows to what is invisible. They
point to reality beyond themselves. For instance, a volcano that erupts
presents a picture of unimaginable force. It becomes a symbol for us if
we, as it were, look through it and see the inexhaustible mysterious force
behind the universe.
Experiencing our mother’s love, we may suddenly grasp that in her
we are touching love itself, another aspect of our mysterious human existence.
Our mother’s love has then been made transparent. Apart from its own
value, it assumes a deeper meaning. It has been discovered to be a symbol
pointing beyond itself. This is the basis for all religion.
It is natural for us to give the high-points of our existence a festive
form charged with significance. When someone is born or reaches puberty or gets
married or dies, we mark the event by a celebration which contrasts with the
dullness of everyday life. In cultures all over the world symbols have been
created that express the deeper meaning of such moments: rituals, customs,
special dresses, specific food and drink. Through these symbols, which are
often religious in origin, we reach out to what lies beyond us and celebrate
the mystery of our existence. In fact, we cannot deal with the most important
realities in our life without signs and symbols.
How are sacraments related to
Christ?
Enter Jesus Christ. He was, in his own person, the deepest religious
symbol par excellence. Scripture calls him the ‘reflection of the
Father’s glory’, ‘the imprint of the Father’s
being’(1), ‘image of the invisible God’(2). Jesus Christ showed
us, in his humanity, what God is like. Whoever saw him, saw the Father.(3) Who
heard his words, heard the Father speak.(4) Everything Jesus did, was a
visible, audible, tangible expression of God’s love for us. Jesus was,
therefore, the living sign of God among us; or, to use the proper theological
term, he was the sacrament of God meeting us, speaking to us, forgiving
us, healing us, making us God’s adopted children. For
‘sacrament’ means ‘sign’.
We Christians believe that in Jesus Christ religion attained a new
dimension. Although natural religious symbols still preserve their meaning,
after Christ’s coming a whole new set of religious symbols was created
that continue Christ’s presence. It is known as the sacramental
order. The community of believers, which we call the Church, is the
overriding sacrament: it is the lasting sign of Christ surrounding us and
holding us. In and through his community Christ speaks to us, saves us, heals
us, fulfils our spiritual needs.
Sacrament is, therefore, a typically Christian term. And although all
actions of the community of believers somehow take place within the sacramental
order, in the course of time certain specific symbols were selected to become
‘sacraments’ in a very special way.
- The central sign of all was shaped very personally by Jesus Christ
himself on the night before he died. He used the typically human custom of
eating together as a sign to manifest and to bring about his unity with us. He
took bread and wine and said, “This is my body for you… This is my
blood of the new covenant”. But it is not only in the eucharist,
the great sacrament of his presence, that he acts upon us.
- When a child is born or a person received into the Church, we
celebrate baptism in Christ. We mark a person through
confirmation for the moment of Christian maturity.
- When a man and a woman marry each other, their shared life
becomes a lasting sign of Christ’s presence.
- The imparting of pastoral responsibility through ordination is
another gesture of Christ.
- When we fall and sin, he is there for us in the sacrament of
penance.
- And in that critical moment of our lives when we are gravely ill, he
is with us in the anointing of the sick.
Christ stands at the origin of all the sacraments even though their
precise form was worked out by the Church in the course of the centuries.
Theological terms associated with
‘sacrament’
Since the twelfth century these signs have been known as the seven
sacraments. The growth of specialist language about this was
unavoidable.(5)
Years ago, in a popular TV programme Esther Rantzen used to award the
weekly prize for ‘beaurocratic gobbledygook’. One gem I remember was
the letter from a municipal planning department:
“Considering inadequate reciprocal first-degree
fire-proof-consistent anti-corrosive adhesion treatment as stipulated in
Amended County Building Regulations sect. IV art. 5b, your application
signaling preliminary intent fails to meet minimal municipal safety standards
requirements.”
Now we must note that the text may sound gobbledegook to us, while
making perfect sense to a building engineer. Specialists who try to be precise,
invent their own language. The same has happened in theology. Theologians have
created a distinct academic dialect. What scholars are saying when speaking of
holy orders, sacrament and ordination can only be fully understood by us when
we take the trouble to absorb their vocabulary.
It took a long time for the precise meaning of the term
‘sacrament’ to be fully worked out. St. Augustine (354 - 430) offered
the first technical definition of a sacrament as “a visible sign of
invisible grace”. Since some people dismissed sacraments as
‘only signs without effect’, St. Thomas Aquinas explained that
they cause grace insofar as they signify it.(6) For example, when
someone is baptised, that person’s sins are truly forgiven and he or she
becomes an adopted child of God. This explanation was repeated by the Council
of Trent in 1547 which declared that the seven sacraments ‘contain’
the grace which they signify and produce their effect not just by the faith of
the recipient but by God whose power is attached to the symbol itself.(7)
In other words, the seven sacraments are effective symbols. The
tearing up of a contract does not only signify the end of mutual
obligations, it brings it about. When a king or queen knights a person by
laying a sword on his or her left shoulder, he/she changes the person’s
status in law.
Catholics believe that, on the full sacramental level, what is
symbolised really happens. The priest gives the absolution - sins are truly
forgiven. In the eucharist Christ is really present under the species of bread
and wine. When a priest is ordained, the bishop consecrates him/her to bring
Christ present in his or her ministry of teaching, healing, presiding,
gathering.
The concern to safeguard the intrinsic value of the sacrament, led
theologians to distinguish three elements:
* the sign itself
(sacramentum tantum),
* the grace it conveys (res tantum)
* and its intrinsic value (res et sacramentum).
When hosts are consecrated in the eucharist, they achieve their purpose
of uniting the faithful to Christ when they are received, with faith, in holy
communion. But what happens to the hosts that remain? If they had a purely
transitory function, they could be simply disposed of after Mass -- as indeed
happens in some Protestant Churches. But the Catholic tradition has come to
regard these hosts as somehow permanently linked to Christ, which is expressed
by Catholic belief in ‘the Real Presence’. So the hosts are kept in a
tabernacle. They can be used later to bring the viaticum to the sick. They
retain some lasting intrinsic link to God.
In three sacraments, baptism, confirmation and holy orders, this lasting
intrinsic link is called ‘character’. Once a person is baptised, he
or she is never baptised again, even if the person gave up her beliefs and her
Christian practice for many years. Because the link to Christ acquired through
the original baptism remains. Once a person is ordained to be a deacon, priest
or bishop, the commission to ministry is there to stay. The Greek word
character means a ‘seal’. The image was derived from the seal
branded into the flesh of a slave or a soldier by which that person was for
ever identified as belonging to a particular master.
Theologians loved to talk of ‘an indelible mark’ branded into
the soul by these sacraments, but this goes over the top. The meaning is simply
that these sacraments have a lasting effect. In other words: once performed,
the sign retains its value and should not be repeated. It was for that purpose
that the Council of Trent declared it to be a heresy “if anyone says that
the Holy Spirit is not given through sacred ordination, or that it is in vain
that bishops say: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’, or that through
ordination no character is imprinted; or that he who has once been ordained a
priest, can be a lay person again”.(8)
If we could have visited a Christian
community during the first century of the Church’s existence, we would
have met three kinds of ministers: ‘overseers’ [episcopoi],
‘elders’ [presbyteroi] and ‘servants’
[diakonoi]. We might also have observed that these ministers were
dedicated by the community to their task through prayer and the imposition of
hands. The Apostles prayed and laid their hands on the newly selected deacons
(Acts 6,6).
Paul and Barnabas ‘laid their hands
on elders’ in Lystra and Iconium, ‘dedicating them with prayer to the
Lord’ (Acts 14,23). Later Paul addressed the assembled elders of
the communities of Asia Minor when he passes through Miletus. He urged them to
care for their flock ‘over whom the Holy Spirit has made you
episcopoi (Acts 20,28). By the time St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch,
died for his faith (110 AD), the three ministries of bishop, presbyter and
deacon were widely established.
But it would be a mistake to imagine that these three
functions had the same contents that they have for us today. In the course of
the centuries so much changed, with variations between different countries as
well, that it is difficult to even summarise the enormous shifts that took
place. All I can do is to sketch some of the major developments.
The ministry that is most clearly recognisable in
today’s terms would have been that of the bishop. He had full pastoral
charge of the local community and presided over its eucharist. In many respects
he did what a parish priest does today. Only gradually did bishops acquire
authority over wider areas, which brought with it the coordinating and
supervising roles now enjoyed by diocesan bishops.
When we speak of a priest today, we are inclined to
think of him as a person who receives spiritual power that enables him to offer
the sacrifice of Mass and administer the sacraments. For many Catholics a
‘priest’ is what is technically known as a sacerdos, a
sacrificial priest, using a term derived from the Temple in Jerusalem and Roman
pagan practice. But this is not what ‘elder’, presbyter, stood for in
the early Church. During the first two centuries there existed no
sacerdos, except for Christ. The whole people of God was sacerdotal.
From the third century onwards the bishop is at times called the
sacerdos of his community, but this is not applied to the elders.
Originally these were not even allowed to preside over a eucharist. Only
gradually, in small places where there was no bishop, elders began to preside
at the eucharist. They had become second-rank bishops. But only the
Middle Ages shaped the theology of the individual sacred priestly
‘character’ that would dominate Church thinking until Vatican II.
The ministry of deacons too underwent many changes. The
Acts of the Apostles report that seven men were ordained deacon to care for the
poor. Soon afterwards we hear of the deacon Stephen preaching and performing
miracles. And the deacon Philip preached and baptised in Samaria (Acts 6,7 -
7,60; 8,4-40). Later we find deacons entrusted with pastoral work, baptism, and
service at solemn liturgies. They were much closer to the bishop than the
presbyters, and often much more influential. During St.
Chrysostom’s time, the management of all church property, as well as the
care of the poor, the sick, and widows, the upkeep of churches and cemeteries,
in a word the entire government of the temporal affairs of the church, lay in
the hands of the deacons. Chrysostom enumerates as sources of church income:
‘fields, houses, rents from dwellings, vehicles, pack-horses, mules, and
much more of that kind of thing’. At least this was the case in Antioch
and Constantinople.
The point I am trying to make is that the ministries
varied greatly in contents, status and function from place to place and from
one era to the next. It would be a mistake to generalise.
More about the theology of ministry in E.J. Kilmartin,
‘Apostolic Office: Sacrament of
Christ’, Theological Studies 36 (1975) pp.
243-265.
Sacramental ordination and the
community
The ministry, whether of bishop, priest or deacon, is an ecclesial
function. From a theological point of view, it should be transmitted through
sacramental ordination. Sacramental ordination is not a personal privilege, no
promotion to higher spirituality nor an ontological change of personality. By
sacramental ordination the community with its leaders expresses that this task
that transcends the power of any individual can only be undertaken through the
power of the Spirit. “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel - woe to
me if I do not live up to my ministry!” This human ‘woe to me!’
is met by the ‘success to you!’ in the calling down of the Holy
Spirit at ordination.(9)
What makes a sacrament a ‘valid’
sacrament?
In the practice of the Church the question has often arisen as to
whether a particular action had been a true sacrament or not.
The Synod of Arles in France decided in 314 that converts from the
Donatist sect should be asked if they had been baptised in the name of the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If they had, their baptism had been valid and they
should not be re-baptised. But the Council of Nicea decreed eleven years later
that the baptism of the followers of Paul of Samosata, the heretical bishop of
Antioch in Syria, was not valid. The reason was that the Paulicians considered
Jesus to be a human being who only became divine gradually. Paulicians had to
be re-baptised.
Then how to determine what the minimum conditions for a particular
sacrament are?
St. Augustine had already noted that baptism requires ‘the word and
a material substance’. He meant: it requires the formula ‘I baptise
you’ and immersion in water.(10) Other Fathers of the Church noted the
same duality. It was the medieval theologians, however, who worked this out in
great detail. For they often were also church lawyers by profession. They loved
to define the exact conditions of a sacrament’s validity. And they drew
their terminology from Greek philosophy that had been rediscovered by the
universities of the time.
Any object was deemed to consist of two components: matter and form. A
cat, for instance, was thought to be composed of two distinct elements, its
body and its inner life, its ‘soul’. Take away the cat’s soul,
and only a corpse is left. Adam was just a clay model [matter] until God
blew the human soul [form] into his nostrils.(11) In the same way, each
sacrament has its matter and its form, both of which are
essential for its validity. In the case of baptism, the matter is washing in
water, the form the baptismal words: “I baptise you in the name of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”, or an equivalent phrase. With regard
to each and every sacrament, they determined matter and form by observing how
the Church actually administered the sacraments and what had been said about
them in earlier tradition.
Now ‘the form’ is identical to the words that accompany the
material sign. Although standard formulas are often used, this need not be the
case. There have been different ways of expressing baptism. The Trinitarian
formula has been widespread. However, there is also ancient evidence for the
use of “I baptise you in the name of Jesus”.(16) Different
forms have been used for the eucharist, for penance and confirmation.
What counts is the intention of the person administering the sacrament. His or
her intention gives inner life to the form. But what happens if the person
administering the sacrament does not fully understand the form? What if she is
an uneducated mother baptising her dying baby? The theologians replied that the
‘minister’ must at least have the intention of ‘doing what the
Church does’.
Intention and form are closely related. When Leo XIII declared Anglican
orders invalid, he did so not only on account of defects in the ordination
prayer (the ‘form’), but also because he judged the intention of some
crucial bishops in the chain of succession to have been insufficient. For,
being influenced by Protestant ideas, they did not want to ordain sacrificial
priests with a view to offering the eucharist. He judged this sufficient to
invalidate the sacrament, for the words they used, did no longer mean what the
Church meant by them.(13)
Notice also the difference between an action being ‘licit’ or
‘valid’. A bishop, for instance, can impart a valid priestly
ordination to a boy who is only sixteen years old. But the ordination would be
illicit, since church law prescribes the minimum age to be twenty-four. It is
the validity question that predominates in theology.
And what about ‘sacramentals’ ?
The community of believers has created many smaller symbolic actions
which are not sacraments [therefore not strictly sacramental], yet somehow
belong to the wider sacramental [= symbolic] order of Christian life. They are,
unfortunately, called the ‘sacramentals’. Perplexity can easily arise
from the same word being used in different senses. In English,
‘sacramental’ as an adjective means ‘belonging to a
sacrament’; ‘a sacramental’, as a noun, means ‘belonging
only to the wider sacramental order’. Confused? You may well be. A
theologian may say: “Yes. Confirmation is sacramental [adjective].
But blessing holy water is only a sacramental [noun]”?
He/she would mean that confirmation is a true sacrament, but blessing holy
water is not.
Such subtle differences exist in other contexts. A similar shifts of
meaning can be seen in the words ‘mobile’ and ‘a
mobile’ [= a hand-held phone]. Compare: “I’m sick in bed and not
mobile. But I have a mobile.” Or think of ‘ordinary’ and
‘an ordinary’ [= church parlance for the bishop of a diocese]:
“It is not ordinary for an ordinary to drive his own car.” Someone
can be ‘a secular’ [= church parlance for a diocesan priest]
without being secular [= worldly] in his life style!
Examples of sacramentals are: marking oneself with holy water when
entering a church building, the blessing of the throat on St. Blaise’s
feast, dedicating a home to the Sacred Heart, exorcism, consecrating a church
or chapel, the installation of readers and ministers of holy communion.
It makes a huge difference whether a theologian judges the ancient
diaconate of women to have been ‘sacramental’ [= a full, true
sacrament], or ‘only a sacramental’ [= no more than a
blessing]. Be forewarned!
Is talking of sacraments in the
Early Church an ‘anachronism’?
Webster’s Dictionary defines an anachronism as ‘a
chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects or customs in regard to
each other’. For instance, if I read in a book: “Jesus phoned St.
Andrew and asked him to hop on the Underground and meet him over a hamburger at
MacDonalds in Bethesda”, I know it is fiction. There were no telephones,
underground trains, hamburgers and fast-food shops in Jerusalem during
Jesus’ time. Are we making the same mistake when we judge ordination to
have been a true sacrament from the earliest times?
Someone once wrote to me:
“Your use of the word sacrament in the context of
the early women’s diaconate is an anachronism. The distinction between
‘a sacrament’ and ‘a sacramental’ arose only in the 12th
century. Hugo of St. Victor (1096 - 1141) was the first to contrast ‘the
minor sacraments’ and ‘the sacraments through which our salvation is
mainly found’. Peter Lombard (1100 - 1160) coined the term
‘sacramentals’ in opposition to the ‘seven sacraments’. You
may not apply our present theological terminology to the Byzantine Church of
the first millennium.”
Anachronism involves placing persons, events or objects in the wrong
time. If I say: “Jesus took a taxi to Jerusalem railway station”, I
am committing an anachronism. But what if I say: “Jesus instituted the
sacraments”? This phrase was actually used by the Council of Trent in
1563. But Jesus did not know the word ‘sacrament’, you may object.
True.
But he was very much aware of the symbolism of the actions he
established, such as baptism and the eucharist. The same applied to the
Byzantine bishops who ordained women deacons. They did not know the word
‘sacrament’, but they understood its substance. The circumstance that
people at a particular time did not have a clear term for an object or
an event, or did not define it theologically as we do today, does not disprove
the reality of that object or event.
In 1995 the archeologist David Soren of Arizona University discovered a
cemetry for children dated to around 450 AD. All the children had died through
a mysterious disease. Soren correlated this event with evidence of an epidemic
sweeping through that part of Italy at about the same time. Some indications
pointed to malaria as the culprit. Then Robert Sellares of the University of
Manchester identified the genes of the falciparum malaria bacilla in the
bones of one of the children. This fatal form of malaria must have been
transported from Africa to Italy and caused an epidemic. The contemporaries
realised that something terrible had hit them, but they could not give it an
exact name. In 467 AD the Roman writer Sidonius described the illness with
symptoms that match malaria, but he simply called it a ‘fever’, a
‘pestilence’. Now it is perfectly legitimate for us to say
that those children died of falciparum malaria, even though it is a term Romans
would not have recognised.
The Hittite language had no word for ‘covenant’ or
‘treaty’, and certainly not of ‘vassal treaty’. Hittites
would vaguely speak of ‘the oath’, or ‘swearing a pledge’.
Yet stone tablets found at Bogazköj in Turkey, contained the complete
texts of at least 19 ‘vassal treaties’, imposed by Hittite emperors
on the kings of Amurru, Ugarit, Kizuwatna and other countries during the second
milennium BC. All these treaties display the characteristic structure of the
names of the partners, prologue, main stipulation of loyalty, covenant
obligations, the invocation of blessings and curses. (14) Is speaking of the
Hittite vassal treaties an anachronism?
From the ritual of the ordination rite it is clear that ordaining a
deacon, whether man or woman, was a very holy and solemn act, through which the
power of the Holy Spirit was bestowed on the ordinand for a sacred task. Here
is clear evidence of the sacramental order of sacred symbols through which
Christ is present to his community. Pseudo-Dionysius (around 500 AD) says that
only three kinds of leaders belong to the ‘order of sacred ministers’
: those who purify (= deacons), those who enlighten (= priests) and those who
perfect (= bishops).(15)
Such considerations make it clear that “both in the West and the
East there were equivalent notions to sacramentality . . . There existed a
widely received theology that understood cheirotonia or
cheirothesia [the imposition of hands] as the act that mediated the
empowerment and the grace of the Holy Spirit on the ordinand. It clearly
entails the substance of ‘sacrament’ even if the word is not
used” (Peter Hünermann).(16)
“From at least 400 AD a clear distinction between major and minor
orders began to emerge . . . Ordination is understood in terms of what we today
would call a sacrament” (A. C. Lochmann).(17)
In other words, Byzantine Christians recognised the ordination to the
diaconate as a sacrament, just as baptism, confession, the eucharist and
extreme unction were sacraments for them, even if they used other terms.
Aimé Martimort is mistaken calling talk of sacrament an anachronism in
this case.
Notes
(1) Heb 1,3.
(2) Col 1,15.
(3) John 14,7-9.
(4) John 7,16.
(5) A readible and up-to-date introduction to the sacraments can be
found in R. P. McBrien, Catholicism, London 1980, vol. 2 pp.
731-745.
(6) Summa Theologica III, qq. 60-65.
(7) The expression used was ‘ex opere operato’ - ‘by the
working of the deed itself’. Trent, Session VII, canons about the
sacraments; Denz 1601-1613. This expression was misunderstood by later
theologians who wrongly ascribed almost quasi-magical powers to the
sacraments.
(8) Denz. 1774.
(9) B. J. Hilberath, ‘Das Amt der Diakonin: ein sakramentales
Amt?’, in Diakonat. Ein Amt für Frauen in der Kirche - Ein
frauengerechtes Amt?, Ostfildern 1997, pp. 212-218; here p. 218 (my own
translation).
(10) ‘Verbum et elementum’: ‘Take away the word and what
can water do? When the word joins the material substance, it becomes a
sacrament’; Treatise on St. John 80,3; J. P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina vol. 35, 1840.
(11) Gen 2,7.
(12) Acts 2,38; 8,12.16; 10,48; 19,5; Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto
1,3, 39-45, J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina vol. 16,742-743; Basil, De
Spiritu Sancto 12,28, J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 32, 116.
(13) Pope Leo XIII, ‘Apostolicae Curae’, 18 Sept 1896; Acta
Sanctae Sedis 29 (1896/97) pp. 198ff.; Denz. 3315-3319. In the view of
later studies by Church historians and ecumenical relations with the Church of
England, it is not sure of this view is still retained by the Vatican.
(14) M.Noth, ‘Das alttestamentliche Bundesschliessen im Lichte
eines Mari-textes’, Gesammelte Studien, Munich 1957, pp.
142-154.
(15) The Heavenly Hierarchy 5, 1, 3; J. P. Migne, Patrologia
Graeca, vol. 3, 504C.
(16) P. Hünermann, ‘Stellungnahme zu den Anmerkungen von
Professor Otto Semmelroth SJ betreffend Votum der Synode zum Weihediakonat der
Frau’, Diaconia Christi 10, no 1 (1975) 33-38.
(17) A. Ch. Lochmann, Studien zum Diakonat der Frau, Siegen 1996,
pp. 167, 189-190.
John Wijngaards
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