Sacramental Cosmology
The Nature and Purpose of the Universe and the Minimum Requirement for the Survival of Christianity
I. Introduction
II. The Turn From a Sacramental Cosmology
III. The Sacramental Outlook as a Human Need
IV. The Sacramental System as Authentic Christianity
V. The Basic Material of Christianity
VI. Conclusion
Introduction
I was raised in a Protestant stronghold in the southeastern United States. My childhood home was literally surrounded by the campus of a southern baptist church. In coastal Alabama, the faith verses works, scripture versus tradition, debates of the 16th century are alive and well, still being played out in basically the same trite form as they have been for the past four, plus, centuries. Sometimes such quibbling is vitriolic, but often it is done in a spirit of good brotherhood and an urgent sense of getting at the right way to be a Christian.
As a youth, I enjoyed discussing and debating these exact things in these exact ways. But as I have grown a bit older and looked a bit deeper into my own Roman Catholic tradition, I have realised the lack of profundity that is brought to these discussions, especially from the Roman Catholic side, which has profound things to say. Especially as I learned of the variety of ancient (pre-reformation) forms of Christianity and what they held in common, each having a clerical class, each honoring Mary and the Saints, each relying on Tradition as well as scripture, and most importantly each possessing a sacramental outlook, I realized that the way these debates are playing out over and over misses something.
It is often said that the best kept secret of the Roman Catholic Church is it’s social justice tradition. The implication being that if we evangelized with more zeal concerning social justice, then progressive secular minded moderns would be more apt to embrace the church. While it is true that the social justice tradition of the church is underemployed, the sacramental worldview, as an evangelical tool, is almost absent. The sacraments are taught as seven specific rituals and sacramental theology is seen as the explanation of the elements of those rituals. What is almost never taught is the cosmology behind these rituals. Understanding this cosmology breaks the image of a pointless or outdated ritual structure, and gives the seeker an outlook that challenges modern spiritual sterility because it facilitates the effectiveness of these rites.
The purpose of this treatise is to help calibrate the debate concerning the fundamentals of what it means to be a Christian. The intention is to shift focus away from the standard categories of faith versus works or scripture versus tradition and also to shift the standard text based validation of such argument, to a more general cosmological validation. This treatise will seek to place the fundamentals of the Christian religion in a context of the sacramental cosmology that existed throughout Christian history.
We will begin with by laying out the standard trajectory of thought that lead to the desacralization of of the cosmos by western culture, along with a basic introduction of what sacramental cosmology means. We will then trace how the Christian sacramental view is the fulfillment of the Jewish temple structure, in conjunction with the New Testament being the fulfillment of the Old Testament or Law.
We will proceed to explore the basic structures of our sacramental system by expounding upon the three primordial sacraments, Jesus, creation and marriage and the structures that frame the system of rites; the four panhuman ritual archetypes, growth, sacrifice, healing, and vocation. Then, lastly we will explore the interrelated nature of the sacramental matter as a foundational human communication system concerning theodicy, life, purpose, and death and come to know these elements as the foundational matter of the Christian faith.
This treatise will not be a point by point explanation of the ritual involved in the seven sacraments as defined by the Roman Catholic Church. Nor will it be a defense of those rituals by reference of scripture, though naturally scripture will be one reference point. The former speaks to what is lacking in the worldview of Christians today, and the latter speaks to the fact that the reformation has been just that, a re-formation of how we talk about and experience Christianity. Instead this treatise will seek a deeper view of sacramental life, such that it is existentially relatable to humanity on a fundamental level and is part and parcel of the makeup of the cosmos as they were constructed from the beginning. The treatise will also seek to situate the seven sacraments in a context makes them, not unique instances of miraculous grace, but unique channels in an already sacramentally geared creation.
The Turn From a Sacramental Cosmology
Holistic to Text Based Christianity
We are going to begin with historical analysis of our conundrum. Often, when someone is asserting traditional sacraments against a Protestant, Bible based, view of Christianity, that assertion comes in the form of the seven specific rituals as defined by the hierarchy of the church. These rituals are pitted against a “preacher” format where the service centers around delivery of a sermon.
Interestingly the way that this argument is proffered from the Catholic end, is by arguing for the validity of these rites from authority, as laid down in scripture, and by showing how they existed from the beginning, as is discernible from scripture. This is an admirable tact, as it takes the issue directly to where a protestant would want to look for any kind of evidence. Where it falls short is when one tries to use it to engage someone who is not Christian. They feel they need to be convinced that the Bible is even worth reading to begin with, before considering how one can technically and skillfully “find” evidence of a complicated ritual system that seems ancient, foreign, and absent. We are alienated from meaning and experience when engaging the sacraments. This is important to remember when considering the protestant end, because even the best interpretive arguments are simply that, interpretations. If one is stalwart enough in their opinion, rational argument will not prevail, only an effective experience. Thus this alienation from any avenue for existential investment in the ritual, intuitive or conscious, blocks a major tool for evangelization.
This leads to the task at hand, which is bolstering the importance of the sacramental life of the church, but not in a way that is extolling what seems like out of context rituals by sophistically manipulating scriptures in order to “prove” their validity. This tact seems fruitless when engaging Protestants and non Christians alike. Instead we are going to seek a worldview in which those rituals make sense and seek to sell that. This cosmology will not exclude scientific methodology, scriptural reference, or facts. But the ritual life of the church and its sacramental cosmology predates possibly even the writing of scripture (given the eucharist, baptism and ordination are obviously in play as well as New Testament hymns that seem to have liturgical function) and certainly any canonization of the books of the Bible. The traditional list of the books of the Bible did not solidify until four hundred years after the ascension. Meaning that for almost a quarter of its history Christianity did not have any semblance of a set Bible. In the Roman Catholic church there was no declaration by an ecumenical council concerning the canon of scripture until Trent in the sixteenth century and this was in response to the Protestant reformation.
The summary here is that the prayer life of the Church is primary to the paperwork. The scriptures are fundamentally important in a certain way, but, lex orandi lex credendi, the prayer life of the church begets its intellectual and doctrinal life. Before any creeds or dogmatic affirmations and far before any agreement on what constitutes sacred scripture the ritual life of the church, imbued with a sacramental cosmology, was the heart of what it means to be a Christian. A sacramental cosmology simply means that God created the reality as a communication system of love and all of it is geared toward that end. Thus physical reality works in conjunction with spiritual reality to convey the grace of God and draw one specific part of that creation, the human, in a life of shared love with God. When one seeks only to validate the seven sacraments by means of the Bible it draws one away from the deeper fact that a sacramental cosmology is what validated the Bible itself, not to mention the incarnation. The paper book and the physical body of Jesus are both physical realities that draw one into relationship with God. But they are situated in an entire reality that operates under the same premise.
As the Protestant reformation gained footing, culture was in the process of jettisoning this basic understanding of the cosmos and replacing it. As a consequence Protestant Christianity takes a more Islamic understanding of revelation and the human relationship to it. Revelations is primarily a text inserted into creation to give information and each person as an individual has a relationship with it. The Protestant variety of Christianity grew up along with printing press technology that allowed it to be a text based religion. Previous to the printing press, Christianity was in no way a text based religion. In a sense, the reformation is an argument based on how to understand texts and who can understand them that unfolded as the repercussions of this invention play out across Europe. All of the major reformation movements agree in some level on certain things, salvation by faith, which is the personal acceptance of Jesus as the savior, scripture alone as the only authority, rejection of the sacraments especially ordination given way they express the priesthood of all believers.
As we shall see, the combination of these takes Christianity from a holistic experience based religion, where one comes into contact and communion with God through all facets of one’s person using methodologies such as calculated ritual, to a cognitive religion based on understanding of texts. The latter view is quasi gnostic. Unlike ancient gnosticism, the knowledge isn’t secret it is accessible in a widely distributed book, but it is an information based religion, that depends on your knowledge of that book. The knowledge is a disposition of acceptance of Christ's salvation, and a subsequent following of his moral code. Any other experience plays a secondary role in this religious outlook. It is not lex orandi lex credendi, but the opposite. It comes down to this variety being a compassionate and exhibishionist form of gnostocism.
The Protestant reformation and the secular philosophical tradition that it has grown up alongside of has left Catholicism in a certain stance of defense. Slowly we as Catholics have come out of the most entrenched and rigid form of that stance into a situation such that we can admit that there was need for reform, while maintaining that some reformers ended up jettisoning essentials. The problem to be addressed here is that, even in the Catholic Church, the focus of the discussion concerning how to live our faith life takes shape as it does mostly because of how the protestant reformation played out. The typical Catholic now also generally makes reference to authority by means of texts. These texts would include the Bible of course and the vast and amorphous magisterial texts.
When Protestants and Catholics argue on the internet, they argue over interpretation of scripture. A Catholic would be unwise to quote magisterial sources as evidence of a good interpretation, because that would immediately cast suspicion in the interpretation by a Protestant. When a Catholic argues with a Catholic on the internet, it is increasingly the case that they shoot magisterial quotes back and forth occasionally backing them with Biblical quotes. The methodology is about the same. “Traditional” Catholics seem to think that as long as those quotes are magisterial and concern something like the proper way to perform a sacramental ritual, or who the ordinary minister of the ritual is, they are remaining traditionally Catholic and resisting any Protestant influence because Protestants rejected the sacraments. But they have bought into catholicism the idea of religious authority and expression being foundationally textual. But as Allen Watts states in Christian Myth and Ritual,
A modern Protestant would base everything on the Bible, but for a Catholic the primary source of Christian revelation is “Christ-in-the -Church”, or rather the Holy Spirit himself informing and inspiring the living Body of Christ. This gives rise to the Catholic principle lex orandi lex credendi- the law of worship is the law of belief. Lex orandi, the law of worship, is not mere liturgical rule; it is the state of the church in worship, which is to say, in the very act of union with God here and now.
The “traditionalist” has also abandoned this view and replaced it with a protestant text based proofing system for Christianity, except they use magisterial documents along with, and often instead of, the Bible. Nothing has made this more clear than when a fairly progressive pope, Francis, was elected for the first time in almost four decades. All of the sudden, traditionalists could do nothing to make their arguments but quote texts that existed previous to his pontificate.
Without knowing it, they have become far more protestant in their methodology and view of the fundamentals of the Catholic faith than they could ever imagine. They have abandoned lex orandi lex credendi and become a text based belief system instead of a sacral belief system, just like our protestant brethren. The worst and most scandalous part of all this is the fact that such argument is so vitriolically rampant, especially in the digital world.
The internet, much like the printing press, has changed the availability of text and the way that we use it. To copy and paste large section of a particular text that backs your opinion and spread them across the world is far easier than trying to get across a worldview or cosmology. The rapidity of the spread of information points has refocused the assumption of what revelation implies. Many seem to think it implies a progressive revelation of information until all information (the fullness of revelation) has been reached. But Jesus does not teach new information in the gospels. All of his lessons and ideas can already be found in the hebrew scriptures. What he did, that his his ability to effect our salvation, is what makes him unique. Our ability to participate in his life is what makes Christianity an effective religion.
With a religion that actually operated lex orandi lex credendi, one’s lived experience and expression of that worldview is the foundation and the chief evangelizer. This is why the vast majority of hagiography of saints recounts situations, actions, conversions, realizations, commitments etc. not intellectual ideas. The shift away from holistic experience to text was facilitated by a shift in cosmology that happened philosophically right along with the development of Protestant Christianity.
Desacralization of Nature
There has been a well documented paradigm shift in cosmology following the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Once the scientific method became the standard for understanding the universe, the focus of study became the particular as opposed to the general. Scientific study breaks reality down to its most basic parts using an uncomfortable hybrid of empiricism and rationalism and seeks knowledge in such a way that truth corresponds to facts. Truth in the “correspondence theory” is particular to the instance. Thus, the weight of a particular nickel can be validated as “true”. This is distinguished for the coherence theory of truth that says that all truth coheres together as a whole and any one statement is incomplete regarding ultimate truth. Thus the weight of the nickel is only one facet of what a nickel is, what it symbolizes, how it is used, what it is made of etc. etc. etc. all the way until the entirety of reality is manifest.
Truth according to the correspondence theory conceives of truth as a measurable reality, known by sense observation. This is the empirical end of the developing cosmology. But simple facts are practically useless until one puts them in a system. So the rationalist philosophers take these facts that are publicly validated by the senses and systematizes them to secular efficiency and comfort.
The hybrid of empiricism and rationalism that gave rise to secularism began to view the cosmos more as a mechanism, a bunch of physical objects running by the set rules of physics. This played out theologically in the deistic movement, where God is seen as the creator and his creation works like clockwork, which runs itself. God, having pressed the “on switch”, need not engage with his creation. This is born out of the over emphasis of God as Creator (the uncaused cause), and fosters with a fixation on causality, which is one of the chief scientific dogmas. Thomas Aquinas describes God in the Summa thusly,
The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
One can see here that how something came into being is a priority, and all of creation is seen as a mechanical string of causal connections. Each instance is particular, even God himself, each analyzable. By the time the idea of the universe as a mechanism was entrenched into the mainstream consciousness the concept of God only had two uses, as a ground for morality and as an explanation for miracles.
Miracles in this cosmology are when God “tweaks the machine” so to speak, and breaks the rules of nature in order to help people out. The sense became that God created a mechanism at the beginning, but every once in awhile he does a favor for someone special. That something special would be known by how it is contrary to the rules of nature, usually specifically contrary to the rules of physics which are most easily observable and codified, therefore most obvious when they are broken. Other than that the universe is a closed system and works by itself. This lead to a view of God as the “God of the gaps”, where the function of the concept of God is simply to explain parts of creation we don’t (yet) understand.
One can see this entire system of thought play out in the deist John Trenchard’s Essay on Miracles
[I] Shall begin by showing the difference between a natural action and a miraculous one. By nature I mean the situation or order God placed things in at the creation, and the motion or operation he gave them to preserve and continue that order. This was certainly a miracle at first.
A Miracle is an action to be wondered at, as when God almighty intercedes, and by his omnipotent power alters the order he at first placed the universe in, or enables or empowers other beings to do so.
The exclusionary use of the creator definition of God allowed this dynamic to develop, and as modern science gained more and greater understanding of causal relationships in the universe, there were less and less gaps to be covered and less and less was seen as miraculous until a point was reached were many could believe that miracles do not exist at all. At this point God is nothing more than Aristotle and Aquinas’ “uncaused cause”, a hypothesis necessary, because we had to come from somewhere, but serving little real function in life, and giving no meaning to the people adopting such views. The remaining function was a moral grounding that, in certain varieties of the Christian faith, was discovered through God’s specific revelation in Christ which is accessible in the scriptures. Hence you have the creation of a work like The Jefferson Bible, where only Jesus’ moral teachings remain after Thomas Jefferson personally edited out any hint of unscientific miracles. It wasn’t much of a further leap after that to go ahead and ask the question, do we really need the God hypothesis at all anymore? Eventually we’ll figure out through physics that the universe is eternal, as for the other remaining function of God, moral grounding, well we can just all agree to be nice to each other and solve that problem.
The Protestant view of Christianity was born out of and grew up alongside this development. Because of that, soteriology in Protestant denominations is sola fide and not at all worried with how the cosmos may be a conveyor of grace. The deistic cosmology forces one to see the sacramental miracles under its definitions, “a breaking of the rules of science”. But the rules broken, for example, bread can’t be changed into a human, weren’t verifiable, thus they were rendered superstitious instead of miraculous. The point of miracles in a deistic cosmology is to wow the observer into a sense of God’s power. Then their rational capacity accepts God’s dominion. But if you can’t validate the miracle, what’s the point? It becomes a meaningless ritual with no effect based on ignorance, superstition. As we shall see the empirically validatable transformation of the bread into human flesh is in not even near the most important part of the eucharistic miracle, though it does happen. Yet because of the cosmological shift that requires public verifiability in order to substation existence, belief in the true presence is easily jettisoned by both secular and Christian reformers during the Enlightenment.
The miraculous aspects of Christianity that the reformers cling to are the incarnation and the deliverance of salvation based on faith as well as an instruction book that informs the individual of that fact and a moral code to follow. The acceptance of amorphous grace offered by Jesus is a good enough miracle, though ivalidatable it is a spiritual and historical reality, so one needs faith in that type of reality (Sola Fide). After that, point, one must get to work at finding the point by point description of morality, which according to the protestant view is to be found in scripture (Desim with an instruction booklet). Scripture impresses, because it relates miracles that thwart the normal physics of the universe. It offers access to salvation because it talks about the greatest miracle, the incarnation and offering of salvation. After that offer is accepted, all one needs to do is turn with one’s reasonable capacities to the scriptures and find out how to act.
The narratives of scripture, God’s offering of salvation through Christ and moral behavior are certainly not bad things, they are simply an incomplete picture of the beauty of Christian life. When one is relegated to these all of reality comes off almost as a test to see if you were paying attention at the right time. A sacramental cosmology and application of the consequence of such a view gives a much fuller picture of Christian life.
The Sacramental Nature of Reality
Unlike the modern west, the ancients saw God not only as the creator from the beginning, but also as the one who keeps creation in place. The ancients had a healthy understanding of God as the sustainer as well as the creator. One way to look at it is that God is creating creation at every point of creation. This view does not allow a person to see God as disinterested in creation because God is deeply immanent to everything that happens. From this view God didn’t put the laws into creation; he constantly enacts the law of creation, he keeps everything as it is.
From this point of view, the assertion that miracles don’t exist seems laughable. If creation is God’s first demonstration of power then we are experiencing that miracle right now. And just as important, we are experiencing it as it is happening, not experiencing the result of the miracle eons later. The event to witness is constantly before your eyes.
There’s a certain type of person that likes to take miracles in the Bible and show how they are easily explainable as natural phenomenon. In the former view of overemphasis on God as creator, this becomes worrisome; especially given the philosophical developments explained above. According to this explanation fewer gaps means less need for God. Thus these explanations usually end with an implied, “so . . . do we really even need God?” When balanced with an understanding of God as sustainer such natural explanations of miracles becomes not only less worrisome, but actually useful.
Thus, with a sustaining understanding of God the fact that all the plagues of the Exodus are explainable by natural phenomenon does not in the least take away from the power of the story or the power of God. God gives force to the rules, he can use them, he can break them, but to worry about whether God did these things or whether they were “just natural phenomenon”, is irrelevant once one accepts that God is intricately involved in every aspect of creation and not a distant troubleshooter. Conversation concerning whether this was “really” a miracle tends to alienate the true point of the story a saving God who loves his people, the downtrodden and oppressed. From the latter point of view, if it happened in creation it’s already a miracle. When regarding scripture questions of historical and scientific accuracy may be important, but not nearly as important as questions of human meaning, relationship and salvation. Natural science and historical fact simply aren’t the types of questions the texts were meant primarily to address.
The difference between our opposing cosmological views was inadvertently summed up on a sketch comedy show I heard once on the radio. The bit this time was a game show where the host had access to a phone that could call the past. The host would call the 13th century and participants had to explain as many major ideas of modernity as possible in a span of twenty seconds. One of the contestants was litanizing at a comically rapid rate and uttered this phrase, “if a fish crawls out of water and talks there’s no God.”
This summation of the inane evolutionary debates strikes right into the heart of the insecurity of someone who cannot conceive of God as working through the normal operations of creation, that if God exists, God can only be a creator and tweaker. If someone who lives in the 13th century was told a fish crawled out of water and talked there would be no doubt that this was a miracle of God. When the statement is phrased this way it takes a millennia long miracle and reduce it to a single instant. In the single instant it looks like a machine tweek under the model of a deistic creator God. A fish crawling out of water and talking is not the an act according to the normal rules of physics. But to have the miracle drawn out over the eons of evolution and working according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology shouldn’t speak less to the power of God.
Because of our overemphasis on God as the creator or first cause and our idea of revelation as a set of texts we have inherited a desacralized sense or nature. Our very distinction between the sacred and the secular seems to have roots in Jesus philosophy in John of being in the world, but not of the world. But the Christian interpretation of that assumes a sacred world that God invests in, a view which has gone by the wayside. Jesus’ caution is against immorality and clinging to political and religious ideologies which are totalitarian as opposed to God focused. His teaching does not seem to assume a dual system of spiritual and physical, in competition, one of which concerns God that you can read about in a text and one of which concerns a self perpetuating machine that you live in.
When reading the sacred texts often the modern mind’s interpretation of the miraculous approaches cosmology the wrong way. It is not “how” but why. The need to wonder whether or not miracles are validatable speaks to the correspondence theory of truth, taking each fact and judging it true or not by empirical validation and reasonable analysis. Was the water turning into blood in Exodus a miracle? Scientific analysis may say no, sustainer cosmology will certainly says yes. But if one takes the coherence theory of truth to be valid, then the question is less how, but why and that “why” is a big “why”. Why . . . everything . . . ?
A coherence theory of truth begs for teleology as opposed to validation. “Why everything?” is answerable in a sacramental cosmology in terms of communication. In the first creation story creation springs from the power of God’s Words. This implies that the thing made is a vast communication system. It speaks to a receiver of that communication built into the system itself, humans. Every aspect of this creation is built to communicate God’s love to a receiver of that communication and draw that receiver into a loving relationship with God. Every facet of our being as humans is constructed to receive the communication and activate the sanctifying grace by which the loving relationship becomes possible.
By every facet, we mean every facet. For example, the distinctions drawn between the physical world, waking world, and the dream world made in the treatise Somnium Spirituality shows the absolute complexity of our construction as receptors of God’s communication and grace. The complex of calculated ritual and the interface of dream, myth and ritual laid out in the treatise concerning Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment also shows how complicated creation is regarding deep human needs. Lastly, the fact that according to our tried and true definitions, sacraments are “outward signs instituted by Christ to convey grace” shows that the physical world is somehow a communicator, and that physical reality conveys grace.
The complexity of each of these examples shows how small a thing it is to rely simply on a set of texts, even if that set is as wide as the Bible couples with all magisterial teachings. To see reality as a communication system built by God to express love is a far more profound than a simple assertion that, sometimes, there are miracles that break the rules of our closed system, for example the incarnation, or the events in the Bible. All you have to do is witness that and accept that Jesus saves you and do what you’re told morally and you’re doing everything you can. Instead, creation is the miracle, we abide in it. It’s miraculous existence is not just for awe, intellectual submission and moral validation, but it is a communication that invites one into a relationship of divine love.
The Bible even validates this view generally yet very obviously,
Hallelujah
I
Praise the LORD from the heavens;
praise him in the heights.
Praise him, all you his angels;
give praise, all you his hosts.
Praise him, sun and moon;
praise him, all shining stars.
Praise him, highest heavens,
you waters above the heavens.
Let them all praise the LORD’s name;
for he commanded and they were created,
Assigned them their station forever,
set an order that will never change.
II
Praise the LORD from the earth,
you sea monsters and all the deeps of the sea;c
Lightning and hail, snow and thick clouds,
storm wind that fulfills his command;
Mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars;
Animals wild and tame,
creatures that crawl and birds that fly;
Kings of the earth and all peoples,
princes and all who govern on earth;
Young men and women too,
old and young alike.
Let them all praise the LORD’s name,
for his name alone is exalted,
His majesty above earth and heaven.
He has lifted high the horn of his people;
to the praise of all his faithful,
the Israelites, the people near to him.
Hallelujah!
This psalm is a brief example of a standard prayer in the Old Testament where, starting with the highest and most broad realities and working toward the more particular, all of reality is seen as praising God. Other examples include psalm 19 among others, God’s speech from the whirlwind in Job chapters 38 and 39, the prayer of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel 3, the entire book of Jonah is a tribute to how God works through creation, as well as the entire first half of Exodus where God’s power is demonstrated through one wondrous work of nature after another. The simple working class parables and images wrought by Jesus as he teaches evoke a master who teaches people to come to know God through their common experience of the physical world.
You can easily note the progression in Psalm 148 from heavenly realities, to natural elements to inanimate objects and creatures to people of all varieties, from the most important to the least. An important device within the Psalm that points to a sacramental cosmology is the observation that these creatures and things are called to praise God, either in and of themselves, or by their existence they praise God for the human mind and experience when observed by a properly disposed human. Thus in his introduction to the letter to the Romans Paul uses a sacramental outlook to note the guilt of the Gentiles for not knowing God through His works.
The immanent/sustainer understanding of God leads to a perfect worldview for having a sacramental cosmology. In this view, God is ever present and in constant contact and communication with his creation. A sacramental cosmology is simply an acknowledgment that God works through physical, tangible reality to convey grace and bring healing to humanity. At its core this interpretation of reality is how one can believe in the God/man Jesus Christ. Jesus is a physical experiential reality that conveys the grace of God to those who encounter him. Also, the God/Man he surmises the communicator, the communication and the one communicated to. Hence the incarnation is a pivotal point in created reality. With a sacramental cosmology, this is not a miracle that relies only on shock value to convey the import. “Wow, God became a human, that’s different!” It is the culmination of a creation God has made in order to communicate just such a reality.
In this section we began by showing how the protestant reformation moved the focus of the Christian religion away from a holistic experience and toward a text based religion. This is in opposition to the ancient view of Christianity, lex orandi lex credendi, which gives priority to lived experience over cognitive experiences. We then briefly traced a philosophical trajectory that began in the enlightenment. This development of thought lead to a desacralized view of reality we called a deistic cosmology. This cosmology was born out of the strict empirical as well as atomistic view coupled with a focus on the creator understanding. We then balanced that view with a sustainor understanding of God and widened our understanding of creation from a mechanism that demonstrates occasional miracles in order to give the rational mind an assent to God, to an entire communication instructed to speak to the entire person.
In the next section we will explore the plan of salvation history in order to see how the sacramental world view is manifest and the ritual system that is set up in order to demonstrate fidelity to God. Despite our caution on over emphasis on Biblical texts as validating, we will cover the meta-story of the ritual system as laid out in the Old Testament and follow it through to how humans show love for God today.
In the final section we will go on to seek to get at the basic material needed to live the Christian life, material that was present at the beginning to humanity, and will be required for the survival of humanity, both spiritually and physically, as is appropriate for a sacramental cosmology.
The Sacramental Outlook As a Human Need
Eden and Postlapsarian Needs and Methodologies for Rectification
Up to this point we have traced the theological and philosophical developments that have lead us to a desacralized view of creation that is deistic in its assumptions. We then discussed the necessity of a sacral cosmology for the Christian view, while balancing the deistic creator view of God with a sustainor understanding that opens one more readily to a sacramental cosmology. In this section we are going to attempt to develop our understanding of sacramental cosmology by parsing various fundamental ways of viewing sacral engagement.
That process is best begun at the beginning. The Garden of Eden was constructed such that God and man dwelled together, and nature itself presented its order to the human person perfectly. What a fulfilled spiritual life would look like in the Garden of Eden is unclear, but it would certainly be natural to the inhabitants of Eden.
Once humanity falls, the struggle, introduced by the fruit with the knowledge of evil, is how to get to a point of good relationship with God like we had when all we had was the knowledge of good. This is the particularly postlapsarian problem. In the Garden it was intuitive to relate to God directly and by means of the physical matter of the garden itself. The Garden was a sign of God’s love, a physical reality that communicated invisible love. It may be helpful here to remember that in sacramental theology, there is a distinction between a symbol and a sign. A symbol stands for something, whereas a sign effects the thing it symbolizes. Water and blood symbolize and effect life. Through mutual interaction God and the humans could explore their loving relationship in concrete ways. Once the view of that gift is tainted by the knowledge of evil, the matrix is harder to work with, but the desire to use the physical reality as a sign of love from and toward God is still built into our being as humans. But because of the trajectory of reformation and philosophy that has lead to a very particular mindset in the modern Christian West.
The standard post enlightenment assumption is a series of revelations will bring us to an intellectual point of understanding our alienation, such that we can accept what is cognitively revealed in the person of Christ, and begin to do good with his help. These revelations come to people, but are only accessible by means of texts. In order to access this revelation, one must be able to read and perform cognitive analysis according to the methodologies of the modern world. But we discussed at length the problems with an over emphasis on reason and knowledge to the exclusion of other virtues in the treatise Aneusomy Syndromes and Eschatological Retention
There seems to be a persistent belief, or once again assumption, that we “will know everything” in heaven, that with salvation comes omniscients. It is the post enlightenment mentality that knowledge is a summative good in and of itself, thus we can’t fathom a perfection where we are in the dark about anything. But of the lists of virtues and gifts of the spirit, knowledge usually gets a low billing. It is not a summative good but an instrumental one, Christianity is not a gnostic religion. With beatitude in The Kingdom of God one could easily conceive of having sufficient knowledge without having anything near absolute knowledge. In fact, the only reference I can find concerning any advancement of knowledge in The Kingdom is Jesus saying, “For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light.” (Lk 8:17). But Jesus is speaking here of the moral character and abilities of people, not all encompassing knowledge of facts and circumstances. What may be reveal in the glorification process is that those possessed of syndromes were closer to perfection all along given their beatitude and it was us and our hyper fixation on knowledge and reason that needed the massive correction.
Instead a holistic system of calculated ritual, which uses signs effective for the whole person out of the scope of the created world constructed as a communication system of the love of God, could be used by a rationally focused person as well as someone with a “syndrome”.
The means of the temptation was to strive against God was fruit, part of creation. This began a dual postlapsarian alienation from God. In the first part, we are alienated because we personally strive to be better than God. In the second part we hold parts of creation as being conduites to divine supersession. These created things could be the principalities and powers, or the elements themselves. In the garden it was a combination of both with regards to the serpent, identified as a subversive principality in the New Testament, or the fruit, part of nature that can be manipulated toward an evil end.
A sacramental cosmology allows for calculated ritual that gives the practitioner the opportunity to offer these temptations over to God, and assert his power and Glory. Recall how calculated ritual was defined in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment
Calculated ritual is a ritual action that utilizes a symbolic language symbiotic with dream and myth, which seeks to invest one in and actualize deep human meaning. It is calculated because it adds or is the interface of the collective unconscious expressed as myth and how this myth is consciously acted upon ritually. This type of ritual is calculated for an effect. The ritual allows for participation in meaning and myth and allows the participant to activate myth and meaning in their own life.
God does not need these things, we do, as is evident in Psalm 51 and Hosea. These rituals are ways for us as humans to connect to deeper meaning and deeper relationship with God. They use the physical environment that God has constructed for just such a purpose. The physical world we abide in is meant to convey grace and proper relationship to us naturally and intuitive, as was the case in the Bible. In post lapsarian reality both God and humans seem to institute, a post lapsarian communication system for showing love of God that is based not just on lived life, but relinquishing of the tendency humans have toward striving for divine supersession. The more noble instance ritual life outside of Judaism that strived for this effect from the human end may have been offered to lesser powers, but even then the intention is other focused, which is better than self deification processes.
After the enlightenment, there was a dramatic shift in cosmology. This shift had a twofold detriment on sacral cosmology. First there was a shift toward a more mechanistic and deistic understanding of the cosmos, rendering them “dead” in terms of soteriological function, and only manipulatable for efficiency and comfort as a secular end. This alienation of the physical world from the spiritual one facilitated a dramatic shift in soteriology away from grace as an interplay and more toward grace as a power, miraculous by deistic definitions, that is shot from afar by God. Or modern soteriologies take a palagian tact, relying on pure moral living, the rules of which are acquired by study of the proper texts. Sacramental ritual became to be understood in the same light as a scientific experimentation, because it uses physical elements, which fall under the deistic cosmology. But since the effects are not publicly verifiable, use of the elements by means of calculated ritual, as opposed to medicine or commerce, was seen as useless and ineffective superstition. Intuitive investment in the sacraments will always at least at a baseline of presence, because they are constructed to speak to the deepest part of our humanity and how we as humans interact with our environment and the divine. But because of the developments in cosmology over the past few centuries there is great room for conscious ritual investment.
Our task for the rest of this treatise is to generally explore the basic panhuman from and matter of the striving we have to use creation in such a way as to get back in relationship with God and how that use speaks to our whole being through creation itself. For the rest of this section we will explore this in the broadest term. The next part of this section will cover a basic overview of the catholic understanding of the primordial sacraments. These sacraments are Jesus, Creation, and Marriage Then will be a cursory exploration of pan human ritual structures. These rituals will fall under the four functional categories growth, sacrifice, healing, and vocation. The next section will unfold the particular ritual guidelines for a sacramental rite as it has developed through salvation history.
The Primordial Sacraments
As we have said, the general way of going about sacramental theology is to go over the ritual symbolism of each of the seven amd/or to validate them from the scriptures. These are noble efforts, but to keep in line with the new evangelization as a serious endeavor, we must begin to speak to people at their deepest levels, not accost them with unreflective cosmological assumptions seeking to force acceptance by means of argumentation and proof texting. This does not work with protestants, who accept a core set of mutual texts with Catholics. It certainly will not work with the modern secular religiously apathetic. Instead our attempt here is to reinvest all parties by means of a worldview or cosmology, working from most general up to a specific point. At this point in the paper we will specify and parse every so slightly from the simple assertion and definition of sacramental cosmology to a threefold categorization of the sacramental worldview.
Everything we need to do this has already been touched upon in some way. It is now only a matter of connecting the dots. In this section we are going to discuss the primordial sacraments. These are sacramental structures that are absolutely basic to the human condition and they are three, Jesus, creation, and marriage.
First and foremost Jesus is the primordial sacrament. This is most obvious in that the incarnation is the clearest most perfect example of the grace of God flowing through physical reality, his human body. Jesus is the perfect instance of postlapsarian sacramental grace in that he is the God/man. His physical presence is the post lapsarian example of anthro authenticity. His soul is the invisible and his body is the visible. His soul and divinity are the form, his corporeality is the matter. And through him all things are rectified. However, his effect as a primordial sacrament not limited to or contingent on the fall and postlapsarian human existence.
A secondary way to understand Jesus as the primordial sacrament is to understand that it is through The Word (Son of God) that all things are made and therefore any physical thing one comes into contact with was created through the Word of God and therefore any grace one receives comes from Christ and Creation.
Which leads to primordial sacrament number two, creation is the primordial sacrament. Again creation is the communication system setup to convey a good relationship within itself and extend love between God and humans. Therefore the creation itself is an outward sign, instituted by Christ (being made by the Word of God) to convey grace. The whole process of creation is an outpouring of God’s love that is to also a means by which to be drawn into God’s love. The absoluteness of these statements cannot be over exaggerated. One must approach the world with a multivalent epistemology and a coherence model of truth as primary to a correspondence understanding. How complex this can be becomes clear in this quote from Somnium Spirituality
If something is known by this method it is called part of the “physical” world. One thing that will be explored throughout this paper is the mistaken perception that the physical world is what you experience by your senses. This may be commonly assumed as a definition for the physical world, but when pressed on the nature of dreams or what a hallucination is, these things, though valid sense experiences of the individual, are not part of the “physical world”. Hence in this paper we shall distinguish not just between the dream world and the physical world, but also between the “waking world” and the “physical world”. The waking world is one’s every experience as they are awake, but the secular scientific definition of knowledge concerning the “physical world” and public verifiability would exclude ghosts, hallucinations, visions etc.
Every facet of creation is able to be a communication between ourselves and God. The dream world will supply the symbology for sacral rites, and the physical world will supply the ability to willfully express those symbols as effective signs in a calculated ritual. The creative and ordering principle of reality, The Word or Son of God, is the foundational source for all of this.
The Humans created in this communication system are made as the part of that creation that receives, processes and cooperates with that grace in order to be drawn into the loving relationships. This leads to primordial sacrament number three. The idea of marriage as the primordial sacrament harkens back to the first story of creation where God explicitly states that he will create human beings in his image and likeness and then creates the man and woman at the same time (the first marriage). It is often noted that the image and likeness of God is borne by every individual. Yet, our creation as man and woman together in the first creation story, with the explicit purpose of creating them in his image and likeness has something important to say about the image and likeness of God. It speaks of the trinitarian abidance of love and how human love is a reflection of that. Effective married life is a living icon of the trinity when sacramentally charged. The two bodies are the outward sign, they are the matter. The loving relationship, caught up in divine love, is the conveyance of grace, it is the form.
These three primordial sacraments set the stage in an interrelated way for the entire effective system of sacramental cosmology. From there humanity in its fallen state has generated a host of systems using calculated ritual because we are made for communicating in these deep ways between ourselves and God. The ultimate goal of these systems is communion with God and neighbor at the deepest level. That is not to say that they are not warped by our postlapsarian inclinations, drawing us away from communion, distracting us from our fellow children of God and from God himself. But any instance of calculated ritual honestly entered into draws one closer.
Humanity has a multivalent devotion, a host of ways of playing out ritual and expressing and sharing our deeper selves with each other and God. The next part of this section will parse slightly more from the three primordial sacrament, to the four postlapsarian ritualistic archetypes we will use in order to generally understand panhuman calculated ritual. Then in the next section we will seek to trace salvation history, not as a series of locational proclamations, or an evolution of politics, but as a development of more and more effective ritualistic parameters applied to patient waiting for the action of the divine.
Four Panhuman Ritual Archetypes
From the three primordial sacraments we can further categorize into four basic types of ritual that humans engage in. This counts biblically, but also as across the scope of human culture. These four types are ritual concerning growth, sacrifice, healing, and vocation. We shall take each in turn. As we do we will note the American manifestation, which will hardly seem like a ritual because it is so intuitive, from the Jewish perspective and the resonant sacrament (of the seven).
The first archetypal ritual concerns growth and begins with birth and/or rebirth rituals. From the seven Catholic sacramental rituals these would be the sacraments of initiation, Baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation. In Roman Catholicism, these are spread out from birth to young adulthood, whereas in Eastern Rites they are all three given to the infant.
Most cultures have birth rituals that seek to bind the new child to the community. This is the beginning of a process where the child then must ritualistically break away and return and reintegrate. The ritual initiation in our highly bureaucratic nation of America takes place with the registration of a child’s birth certificate and the assignment of a social security number. This is augmented by a host of other cultural rituals, local regional etc. In the Jewish practice this ritual is circumcision of the male on the seventh day. And of course in Christianity this would be the sacrament of baptism.
The next growth ritual is a weaning ritual marking the first separation of the child from the parent (mother). The child is removed from a specific attachment to his mother. The most universal American manifestation of this is the first day of school ritual. There is no specific weaning ritual in levitical law, but there are traditional Jewish blessings, and such a ritual was the venue for Sarah’s discontent with Hagar in Genesis 21. In this more ancient tradition the separation takes a biological tenor because the deep symbolism is the separation of the nursing child, which forms a bio-unit with the mother, from his host. Though this manifestation of the ritual is not prominent in America, it has been a panhuman staple given the basic nature of child sustenance before the innovation of bottle feeding.
The Christian manifestation of this is the eucharist, which will also be our major ritual for the next category, sacrifice. First communion in the Roman tradition happens as a transition from simple baptism, where parents and godparents have vouched for the baby, to self relation to God via one’s own ability to receive and consume the host.
The last growth ritual after birth and initial separation is the initiation into adulthood. This ritual marks self sufficiency to the degree a given culture recognizes such a thing. As of late, America has developed a multitude of adulthood rituals. The most effective are the obtaining of a driver’s licence and graduation ceremonies appropriate to the socioeconomic class of the initiate. The standard Jewish ritual for initiation into adulthood is the bar/bat mitzvah. For Roman Catholics this initiation is confirmation, where the initiate receives the gifts of the holy spirit and the ability to work with these gifts toward a Christian life.
The postlapsarian human condition is a growth process from the communion of the Garden across the scope of to the eschaton. These rituals cue into an initial connection that must be broken in order to find independence and then a reintegration into a larger system as a fully developed human in order to find fulfillment. This division, individuation, and reintegration circuit is a key framework for developmental psychological models, mythic hero cycles, and anthropological ritual analysis. As an example of calculated ritual, all of the factors needed are present and thus these themes play over and over again across human consciousness and subconsciousness.
The next type of panhuman ritual archetype is the sacrificial ritual. After the fall we get our first glimpse of an attempt to show respect to God in some way in postlapsarian reality. That way retains a sacral cosmology and utilizes calculated ritual in the form of sacrifice. These are the sacrifices offered to God in the form of plant and animal by Cain and Abel. This is the beginning of an entire narrative that flows through the scope of both the Old and New Testament involving how one relates to God. God created everything good, but in postlapsarian reality, we turn our worship to these good things. After the fall, we get our first instance of sacrifice with Cain and Abel. Both vegetation and animals allow one to continue life through consumption, thus they are extremely powerful and important. They are easily valued over God if one is obsessed with self preservation, as opposed to divine sustenance.
Because of the post Enlightenment shift in cosmology, the sacrificial systems of the ancient world seems antiquated, superstitious and needlessly complex, but it is an attempt through calculated ritual to answer a very complex question. How do I show love to God? For my fellow humans I can show love by helping them, teaching them, giving them gifts, bringing them joy. But God does not need help, he already owns anything we could give him, we can teach him nothing and he possesses perfect joy. How does one honor God?
The answer is that one cannot “do” anything for God, but one can show love by taking valuable things, especially things one may be tempted to value over and above God, and releasing them from one’s ownership. The most absolute way of doing this is by some form of destruction. By releasing these object from our grasp it shows that we do not value anything we own more than we value God. In its purest form as part of a system of calculated ritual, this is the way we can show love for God and God alone. In its corrupt form it comes off as prideful, or an attempt to buy favor from gods that are somehow prone to such bribery. Sacrifice as part of a calculated ritual pulled off appropriately is the highest of rituals in a religiously invested society, and the most meaningless in a completely secular one.
Any of the other examples of panhuman ritual in a religious culture, would most likely presence a sacrifice of some kind. This way, “the ultimate” is brought to bear, remembered and honored. In a secular culture, where the only sacrifice worth giving, or the only love worth sharing is terrestrial in scope, such lavish destruction seems absolutely beyond understanding.
Thus the American secular world, though there are a multitude of sacrificial rituals, they are all person centered. A typical example of an American sacrificial ritual complex that seeks disposition toward the other and the betterment of the cosmos is a college savings fund. Another is the elaborate network of consumerist gift giving rituals, where the gift is nothing needed, but a buy-in of a cultural phenomenon.
In the ancient Jewish culture, the levitical code has a multitude of laws concerning when where and how to perform sacrifices for revolving around all kinds of ways that relate to God. These sacrifices were both vegetative and animal and were ideally performed in the Temple of Jerusalem.
In the Roman Catholic Church the sacrificial ritual par excellence is the Eucharist. It is certainly preferable to celebrate this sacrifice along with all other calculated rituals that form the seven sacraments. Also all paraliturgical ritual and any sacramental actions draw meaning from the eucharist. Any rites developed on the level of the domestic church should have grounding in this ritual.
The Euchsrist encompases the deepest meaning of the human condition. Many volumes have been written on how this is the case and how it is backed up in scripture and tradition. It would be beyond the scope of this treatise to delve as deep as we would need to in order to treat this topic with care. For now, suffice to say that the Eucharist is the center of the ritual and spiritual life of the Roman Catholic or any ancient variety of Christianity.
The third panhuman ritual archetype concerns healing. The general human experience of post lapsarian reality is one of alienation and brokenness. Thus a ritual structure for healing and communion is necessary. On the terrestrial plain these may take the form of expulsions and reintegrations into a community, biological repair rituals, spiritual repair rituals etc. Concerning transcendence, these types of calculated rituals seek to connect one to transcendence either by restoration of an appropriate relationship or by full integration, meaning the actor in the ritual becomes one with transcendence.
Being a secular society based on progress, America has a large amount of healing rituals geared toward the terrestrial. The entire medial apparatus of our society is an example of attempt at biological repair, but done in such a way that it still maneuvers within the framework of calculated ritual. The gowns, the shape and look of the hospital edifice, the mannerism etc are all precision instruments as well. Running along side that is a parallel complex of rituals to heal the spirit called mental health, filled with the same ritualize characteristics. There are also a host of other complicated ritual structures for public apologies of public figures, which could make for a fascinating study.
In the levitical code there are also a host of purity laws concerning physical and mental health. The large portion of the levitical sacrificial laws concern healing the division between God and humans.
In Catholicism, the healing sacraments are Reconciliation and Anointing of the Sick. These two each seek to heal in the same two ways. Reconciliation is concerned with mending the damage done by sin in one’s life and rectifying the alienation it has caused concerning one’s relationship with God and one’s neighbors. Anointing gives meaning to suffering and a reminder that the physical world is constructed for good and is still geared toward bringing health and reconciliation.
Part of the postlapsarian human condition is degradation of our physical being and our constant missteps concerning healthy relationships. We as a species know from our interaction with food, that the physical environment has something to do with maintaining biostability. We quickly connected this to medicines that have a similar effect. To view this only as an innovation of modern medicine is to ignore any anthropological data. Also to think that modern medicine is so objectively sterile as to not have any ritual involved is only to demonstrate the high level of intuitive ritual investment we bring to our medical experiences.
Humans seem to be aware that something is wrong and have constructed an overarching response to this involving manipulation of environment and calculated ritual that invests those manipulations with meaning. We also invest in structures of social healing such that we can reunite as a whole community.
The final panhuman ritual archetype is vocational. This is an investment in one’s mission call of duty in life. Marriage as the primordial sacrament crosses cultural barriers as a panhuman example of this. Yet there are other ritual investitures that serve the same purpose, for example in America, once a marine always a marine. There is an investiture ritual that seems to have the ethos of binding one to this job in perpetuity. We also have a federal judiciary that makes life appointments. Apart from that there are several respected fields that have a certain ethos about them. For example, doctor, lawyer, teacher, firefighter, policeman. People who work at the Department of Motor Vehicles or people who work as serving staff in a restaurant do not get such social respect, even though their jobs are important to how our society functions.
In ancient Judaism ritual investitures are generally enacted by anointings. Examples would be priestly or royal offices. In the Catholic tradition the vocational sacraments are Marriage and Priesthood. Each of these are life vocations. The two people of marriage and the one person of the priest key into three pivotal people in the Christian story, Adam and Eve for the marriage, and Christ for the Priest. These people give all of us our mode of being as humans at the deepest level , so their stories speak to everyone. Yet, they each invest their target vocation in specific ways that allow for a life investment.
Individually, there is a deep need for understanding our purpose and meaning in the universe. The narrative of the hero, as played out cross culturally, always end with the hero in a position of meaning in the community. Each of us as humans desires to serve our community is some way that will be fulfilling for us and these stories help us find our mode of being.
Societies place value on certain roles to the point that the investiture of that role becomes institutionalized as a calculated ritual and the role itself becomes part of the person's character. The role they play becomes part of the meaning that the culture finds in itself, and they become demonstrators of that value. Thus their glory is a glory to the culture, and their fall and/or shame is a shame to the culture.
Thus far we have traced out the philosophical and historical circumstances that have led us to a place where sacral cosmology is underappreciated. The Christian religion has become a text based religion thanks to a shift in cosmology. Then we began to set up the cosmology needed to counter a strict deistic or mechanistic cosmology, and begin to see how grace flows through physical reality.
In the second section we covered the general anthropological and biblical outlook that traces out our deep human need for calculated ritual in general. This included why, in a post lapsarian world, calculated ritual is necessary given the Fall. From there we parsed three primordial sacraments, Creation, Marriage, and Christ, that set the stage for all of reality being a complex communication system of divine love. From those primordial sacraments we then set up a system of panhuman ritual archetypes that are a matrix for the multicultural variations of calculated ritual. These were growth rituals, sacrificial rituals, healing rituals, and vocational investitures.
In the next section we will explore the foundations of the Christian religion as we discuss the basic matter of the sacramental system. After a historical and theological exploration that roots the Christian sacral system in its Jewish heritage, we will attempt to do is answer the question, what is necessary for Christianity to survive. This will take place as an illustration of matter and form in the sacramental system of Ancient Christianity.
The Sacramental System as Authentic Christianity
Thus far we have explored a theological and philosophical development in history that had biased people against a sacramental cosmology. In the first section we traced out that theological and philosophical history, exploring the deistic tendency to mechanize reality instead of approach is a sacred, and the post enlightenment tendency of Western Christianity as a whole to treat Christianity as a religion of texts to be analyzed. In the next section we drew attention away from texts and toward the deep human need for expressing religious devotion using the created world in which we abide. Working from the grandest scale down to a basic ritual framework, we explored how humans utilize creation as a way to understand God, commune with God and receive grace from God.
In this section, we will explore how the sacramental system as present in ancient Christianities is not only a good way to be Christian, but is the way to be authentically Christian. After casting doubt on the assumed post enlightenment protestant narrative of the development of Christianity we will develop a sense of Christianity that helps the reader understand the sacral system as continuous in the flow of human history. We will trace temple Judaism to temple Christianity and begin to lay out and ecclesiological understanding of the church that sets the focal point not on hierarchical titles or paperwork, but on the church, the assembly, as the temple of God. In the final section of this treatise, we will examine the fundamentals of the Christian faith, not as the texts, but as the sacramental matter that is required for devotion to God.
The Assumed Protestant Narrative and the Ancient Churches
In order to begin we must address some concerns that spring from the protestant mind when contemplating sacramental cosmology and whether or not it is appropriate to Christianity, much less necessary. In the Protestant mind there is a basic assumptive narrative that explains the existence of the Roman Catholic Church. First there was Christ and his apostles, they were very much like modern protestants. They weren’t Jewish, because Paul said they didn’t have to follow the Old Law. At the same time, they weren’t in any way like the pagans, because Jesus said to love God with all your heart, not false gods. But then Christianity spread into the Roman Empire and changed. If they are astute in history, they may even reference Constantine. At that point Christianity becomes corrupted from it’s original form and turned into a pagan based religion that used pagan rituals. The best evidence of this is the Eucharist as it is manifest in the more ritualized form of the late medieval period.
The focus on the seven rituals, the priests who officiate them and the buildings and trappings that accompany the is evidence, according to Protestants, of the inauthenticity of the Christian nature of Roman Catholicism. This is especially true because they don’t specifically appear in the Bible and obviously developed to the point they are at now over the centuries. But this simple linear view takes only the western church into account. It is interesting to take the many other varieties of ancient Christianity into account and see if this is a Roman phenomenon alone, or was something else going on?
Many American protestants are barely aware of the existence of the Greek Orthodox church, and when it is brought to their attention they assume it is simply a vague offshoot of the Roman church. When other rites, such as the Coptic Orthodox church in Ethiopia, or the St. Thomas Christians of India along with many other varieties of oriental orthodoxies are added, it becomes apparent that there are a large group of ancient Christianities that all have a lineage stretching back to the earliest times. They are also all invested with a sacramental cosmology. All ancient Christianities have a clerical class, a sacramental ritual system with a Eucharistic liturgy at its center. Each has reverence for Mary and the Saints and has an understanding of authority that resides in the texts of scripture and Tradition coupled with a living magisterial office.
All of these similarities seem to go all the way back to the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, the first generation of Christians after the Apostle. Many Christians are unaware that there are Christian writings contemporary with the New Testament and writings that bridge the gap between St. Paul and Constantine. It may even come as a shock that these writings seem to back up a sacramental foundation for Christianity over a scriptural one. In fact the only citations that any apostolic fathers, who are gentile, give from “scriptures” are from the Hebrew Scriptures yet, at the same time, they seem to have this sacramental cosmology and priesthood well in place only decades after Jesus’ ascension. It doesn’t suit the assumed narrative. But where did all these rituals come from? They don’t seem to be things Jesus and Paul were doing after the fashion of the Roman church at all. Neither Jesus nor Paul talk about physical reality conveying grace, or the necessity of attending eucharist.
Again, it will not be our purpose to make a point by point proof of the seven sacramental rituals out of scripture in this treatise. Our point is to convey a cosmology that is authentically Christian, and even necessary to hold for a fully developed Christianity.
First, unless one is either a docetist or denies the divinity of Christ, as a Christian one must believe that grace flows through physical reality, because Jesus is the example of physical reality conveying ultimate grace. Also, to believe that a paper Bible in some way brings you closer to God admits that physical reality can convey some sort of grace. But how does the grand expansion into a complex ritual system as specific as Roman Catholicism make sense in the context of Judaism or is it a deviant innovation of Christianity as the protestant narrative assumes? To use the aforementioned psalm as a prooftext of sacramentality by one source in the Bible and then layout an entire argument out of a point by point textual proof, either scriptural or magisterial, is indicative of the entire problem laid out in the previous section. It has been done and is convincing in a way, but what is needed is a more general understanding of salvation history.
In the treatise Ordinary and Extraordinary Religions we came to understand salvation history through a particular lens. We saw salvation history as a development of an ordinary means of grace. In this section we will develop a similar lens, but instead of comparing and contrasting ordinary and extraordinary means of grace, we are going to acknowledge the sacramental cosmology as universally applicable and focus on the ritual systems developed throughout salvation history as indicative of God’s work in human history.
Temple Judaism
In the previous section, we laid out five panhuman ritual archetypes. These were ritual structures that develop into culturally specific calculated rituals as a way for human beings to reinvest in the sacramental nature of the cosmos and mitigate the damage of The Fall. Those rituals developed in the line of Abraham into an ordinary means of grace.
When we discussed the panhuman ritual archetypes, we described sacrifice as the particular way that humans try to relate to God specifically. It is the way that, through calculated ritual, humans can show gratitude, glory, submission, etc. to God. After the initial postlapsarian sacrifice of Cain and Abel, the narrative continues with Abraham who, when he journeyed through the Canna,
. . . passed through the land as far as the sacred place at Shechem, by the oak of Moreh. The Canaanites were then in the land.
The Lord appeared to Abram and said: To your descendants I will give this land. So Abram built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country east of Bethel, pitching his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. He built an altar there to the Lord and invoked the Lord by name.
Clearly sacred places and items were utilized by Abram in Palestine in the same way they are used by ancient varieties of Christianity. They form part of a complex of calculated ritual that utilizes sacred places, artifacts and sacrifice.
Abraham is given a promise that all nations would find blessing through him and his progeny. How the Jews see this promise as playing out lines up well with how we understood salvation history in terms of ordinary and extraordinary religions. Jews obviously do not see Jesus as the messiah. They also do not see their messiah as coming to convert the entire world to Judaism. The job of Judaism in the Jewish mind is to occupy the land of Israel as a nation, follow the law delivered on Mount Sinai, which is a covenant God entered into with them as a specific family. These laws, which include a temple sacrificial system, would demonstrate to the gentile world how awesome it is to be in good covenant with God.
The Jewish covenant as expressed in the Torah has a vast network of laws explaining the narrative, items and actions of the sacrificial system as well as an entire way of regarding and acting in physical reality that attunes the practitioner to the will of God for a Jew. The center of that system was a temple that the Jews believed, for all practical (or at least ritual) purposes, housed God. When one makes a cursory read of the ritual laws of Judaism, one cannot but surmise that they believed that physical reality somehow connected one to God. Not simply in a way such that we are physical being, so of course physical reality plays into our relationship. But that there is a complex of calculated ritual, which speaks holistically to the human person and utilized all of the four panhuman ritual archetypes. There are sacred objects and ritual actions are performed in sacred spaces utilizing the narratives of the culture. None of this makes sense unless one assumes a sacramental cosmology.
Again, in the Jewish narrative, we gentiles would not convert to Judaism, but each nation would enter into a covenant appropriate to our own people. According to the Jewish understanding, gentiles would employ calculated ritual suited to our culture that adheres to the Noahide Covenant. Though the Temple of Jerusalem was constructed for Jewish rites, and Gentiles are under no duress to convert to Judaism, there is still a court of Gentiles in the second temple such so that righteous Gentiles can worship God with an eye on Jewish ritual, which would have a calibrating effect for them, given that in the second temple, their religion was the ordinary form. The Third Temple as described in Ezekiel has no Court of the Gentiles, because if the Messiah comes, they would presumably have their own means of ritual worship, appropriate to their familial/national/cultural relationship with God. Indeed, both Christians and Muslims, as abrahamic faiths, should be seen by Jews as the natural progression of the revelation to Abraham, each entering covenant with God appropriate to themselves.
Thus we come to a point where we can start to understand these seeming pagans embellishments of what “should have been” a 1st century post enlightenment based Christianity are not out of sync with Abrahamic worship in any way. Nor is it actually an embellishment, but simply the a gentile manifestation of calculated ritual born out of the panhuman ritual archetypes that are necessary for humans to find fulfillment and peace given how and why they were constructed in the first place. In the mindset of Ancient Christianity, there is a natural progression from Temple Judaism to a Christianity that actually operates lex orandi lex credendi by means of calculated ritual.
The Christian Temple Complex
The Earliest Christians were Jewish, and continued to worship in the Temple of Jerusalem until it’s destruction. Their “paraliturgical” action was the “love feast” of the Eucharist. They continued to follow the law of Moses as was appropriate for them. An early controversy for Christianity that is continually in the background if not the foreground of the New Testament is whether or not Gentile Christians had to follow Jewish law, including the rituals. The answer came in the form of the Council of Jerusalem, which stuck to the standard Jewish belief that Gentiles are not required to follow Jewish law. They only needed to follow the noahide code.
Interestingly, this seems to lead to an assumption for the Protestant minded Christian that early Christianity is “anti ritual”. This may also seem evidenced by the fact that when they were kicked out of the temple and synagogues, they did not immediately build their own ritual spaces, but as we shall see, they had already developed one. However, just because Gentiles did not have to follow a certain set of Jewish rituals does not mean that they could not or did not have a ritual life, even in early Christianity.
When the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, Judaism did what was customary during these tragedies. When the first temple was destroyed, they codified their writings and became a text based religion revolving around the Torah until the second temple was builts. With its destruction by the Romans, They retreated to their portable law, codified the Talmud and awaited a day for the rebuilding of the temple. Christianity, for its part had already began a replacement temple structure, yet this time, the temple itself is portable because it is made of living stones. Sacramentally based Christianity in its most ancient forms is very much in sync with Temple Judaism. The sacrificial system is seen as summed up in the sacrifice of Christ, who is the dwelling place of God on Earth. Not to prooftext, but old habits die hard, “destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it.” In the New Testament, Hebrews very clearly lays out how Jesus himself sums up the purpose and meaning of the temple, he is the priest and victim and his one sacrifice is effective across the scope of creation.
In Christianity's temple structure, Jesus is the sacrifice, but we participate in that sacrifice by means of the eucharist, which “re-presents” his sacrifice to us as was discussed in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment. The “temple” in this sacramental complex is not the church building, but the people involved, “the assembly”. As 1 Peter says,
Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
In dealing with the diaspora initiated by the Romans, the Jewish people retreated to text and law. The Gentile Christians were able to handle a similar situation, expulsion from the temple and the synagogues, because they carry their temple with them because the assembly is the body of Christ, the living temple of the one true God. The assembly of the people is the temple, and each member is a temple of the Holy Spirit. This is why no variety of ancient Christianity is afraid to ask for the prayers of those who have gone before us. All of us together are the Body of Christ. Those who abide spiritually in heaven are still part of the temple complex and have part to play.
The ritual system of this temple for those who still abide corporally is summed up in the “love feast” or the Eucharist, where Christ’s one time effective sacrifice is made present. In this ritual Jesus is present in the eucharist in a special way as well as in the community, as the temple where God dwells. All of this forms a ritual complex that was commented on in the former paper The Onesiman Interface,
For Catholics, Jesus, being the first order of priest we are going to discuss, is the summation of this and all other theocentric sacrificial systems. Jesus’ sacrifice is the giving up of his life for the love of God and neighbor. Jesus’ sacrifice is the perfect sacrifice because instead of giving up one thing of value, he gave us everything of value, his every experience. It must be remembered also, that Jesus’ death is only the culminating act of his sacrifice. His sacrificial death is only understood in light of his sacrificial life, that he gave up his entire will throughout his life to live for the Father. This is significant because anyone else may in a moment of extreme grace give up their life for love of God and neighbor, but the entirety of a life lived as a living sacrifice is unique to Christ.
The next type of priesthood in the Catholic Church is that type that is ordained into the sacramental system of the Church. Jesus is the one who instituted the sacraments, but they are carried out in his body, the Church, through the span of history by the ordained priesthood. By their ordination, they become vessels by which Christ, through the sacraments, conveys grace. During a sacramental ritual, the priest stands in persona christi not just in a dramatic or theatrical way, but in truth by his ordination. The human priest himself is inconsequential in this position, but his physical body is a necessary as part of the outward sign of the sacramental ritual. Because of that they may also stand in persona christi in an informal way in a church community, this time dramatically or theatrically, because in the Catholic Church they have made a sacrifice of themselves and decided to live for the institutional church, putting off marriage and personal wealth.
This small personal sacrifice by the priest and his ability to stand in persona christi in the Church community apart for sacral ritual leads us to how the laity is understood as holding a priestly office in the Catholic Church. In the view which Paul has of the Body of Christ, all of the faithful form a temple of living stones, made sacred by their sacrificial acts to Christ in their daily lives. Any giving up or releasing to the deity puts one in the position of a sacrificial actor, that is, a priest. Thus during the eucharistic prayers, when the ordained priest says the collect, “pray brothers and sisters that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the almighty Father”, the “and yours” is a recognition that, though there is a ritually ordained priest functioning here according to the sacramental system, there is also a community of priests whose daily sacrifices are also on the altar being offered to God. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) says in article 901,
Hence the laity, dedicated as they are to Christ and anointed by the Holy Spirit, are marvelously called and prepared so that even richer fruits of the Spirit maybe produced in them. For all their works, prayers, and apostolic undertakings, family and married life, daily work, relaxation of mind and body, if they are accomplished in the Spirit - indeed even the hardships of life if patiently born - all these become spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. In the celebration of the Eucharist these may most fittingly be offered to the Father along with the body of the Lord. And so, worshipping everywhere by their holy actions, the laity consecrate the world itself to God, everywhere offering worship by the holiness of their lives."
Thus the system of calculated ritual can expands far beyond the Eucharist, first in the form of the other six sacraments and other paraliturgical ritual. Not to mention how this extends into the ritual life regions, diocese and the domestic church.
Thus the church, “the assembly” itself is a sacrament. As Lumen Gentium says,
Christ, having been lifted up from the earth has drawn all to Himself. Rising from the dead He sent His life-giving Spirit upon His disciples and through Him has established His Body which is the Church as the universal sacrament of salvation. Sitting at the right hand of the Father, He is continually active in the world that He might lead men to the Church and through it join them to Himself and that He might make them partakers of His glorious life by nourishing them with His own Body and Blood. Therefore the promised restoration which we are awaiting has already begun in Christ, is carried forward in the mission of the Holy Spirit and through Him continues in the Church in which we learn the meaning of our terrestrial life through our faith, while we perform with hope in the future the work committed to us in this world by the Father, and thus work out our salvation.
Already the final age of the world has come upon us and the renovation of the world is irrevocably decreed and is already anticipated in some kind of a real way; for the Church already on this earth is signed with a sanctity which is real although imperfect. However, until there shall be new heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells, the pilgrim Church in her sacraments and institutions, which pertain to this present time, has the appearance of this world which is passing and she herself dwells among creatures who groan and travail in pain until now and await the revelation of the sons of God.
The Church is the outward sign, instituted by Christ to convey grace. It is the visible sign of invisible grace and love of God. But that sign is not the a frozen sign of an impersonal God. It is living stones, a dynamic sign of a loving and yearning God, who seeks to meet us where we are and bring us to himself.
Thus, the Church is “catholic”; that is universal. Any given culture will have its way of applying and manifesting the calculated ritual. But the basic material needed, the topic of our next section, is actually quite spare.
After a review of the intellectual and theological thought that has led to the mechanized as opposed to sacral view of reality as well as the text based versus sacramental based view of religion we then sought to understand the deep need of humanity to interface with divinity in a sacramental way, and a way that involved calculated ritual as a result of post lapsarian reality.
In this section we generally traced the Jewish roots of the sacramental nature of ancient Christianity. These roots started with the first sacrifice of Cain and Abel, and developed into systems of sacrifice among both the gentiles and the Jews. The Jewish sacrificial system was the ordinary form, containing rituals falling under all four categories of the panhuman ritual archetypes until Christianity brought their ritual system to the Gentile world by means of the messiah. At that point the temple complex housing the divine presence and the system of calculated ritual transitioned from brick and mortar to the living structure of the assembly. This allows for a diversity of ritual expression based on the nation's families and cultures of the gentile world based on their covenant with God through Noah.
In the next section we will review the specific material necessary for Christianity to survive. If the earth were facing nuclear holocaust, and the only rocket to a habitable planet was leaving, what would one need to take in order to allow Christianity to survive? The answer will not be a book, but the matter and form of sacral ritual. We will discuss what these are how they relate to each other, how they relate to the meta narrative of humanity, and what they mean for us.
The Basic Material of Christianity
This treatise has been on a trajectory to this point and toward this question, what does one need to have available to preserve Christianity? We discovered that the basic answer to that question has been clouded by a hyperfocus on texts that seem fundamental to religion and a need to downplay the sacral nature of reality philosophically. We sought to understand the deep human need for encountering God through his creation and how this transitioned in form from an intuitive situation to a situation of calculated ritual in postlapsarian reality. Then we explored the particular development of calculated ritual of Temple Judaism and how Christianity fulfills the trajectory of salvation history by reshaping the temple structure from inert stones to living stones.
So what does one need to take onto the proverbial rocketship to another plant in order to maintain Christianity. What is the seed, or most basic stuff of the Christian religion. The knee jerk reaction is, one need the Bible. But it must be remembered that for nearly a quarter of Christianity’s history there was no semblance of an agreed upon canon of scripture. Thus, though the stories and understanding of salvation history it contains are essential to Christianity, the paper book that is the Bible as a sacramental, important as it is, could not be considered essential as we shall see. Before the canon of scriptures was solidified the living magisterium was the guidance of the early church.
Fundamental Sacramental Matter
The physical things you need to continue Christianity are the things one needs to carry on the sacramental system of the church. Church buildings and vestments, statue and icons, manuscripts and vessels, none of these things are necessary as they exist right now, for there was a time when Christianity did not have them. Instead what is needed is the deposit of faith, the basic information, which would include the narrative of salvation history, and the “form” of the sacraments, that is, the words spoken in conjunction with the matter that make the sacramental ritual effective. The only other thing needed is the “matter” of the sacraments, the physical things needed in order to make the sacral system function. Assuming the information is retained by memory or inspiration, the only thing left required to preserve Christianity is water, wheat flour, grape wine, olive oil and three humans; one female and two males.
Why these specific things? The first male body is the ordained body, which stands in persona christi in the sacramental system as sacramental matter. So, for example, the priest's body and the body of the sinner are the only matter needed for the sacrament of confession. The priest’s body will be needed to mediate the presence of Christ according to how the sacraments work as calculated rituals. A male and a female body are needed to perform the sacrament of marriage, their bodies in sexual congress being the matter of the sacrament. In this sacrament they image the invisible triune God as was the case in the first creation story. Hence, “Where every two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also.” The bodies of these three people are the temple, in which the spirit resides and through which the living sacrifices are made.
Water and olive oil are needed to perform baptism. Bread, made from wheat flour and water as well as grape wine is needed to perform eucharist. Olive oil is needed to perform confirmation and sacrament of the sick.
Thus what you need to make the church function is a small set of things, each natural. Personally I am a great admirer of highly developed and stylized liturgy. But whatever requirements canon law may make, these six things, along with the knowledge and inspiration of the deposit of faith are all one needs to continue Christianity. Again the deposit of faith is not a set of texts. It is the living relationship the magisterium has with the Holy Spirit, and how they use that relationship to safeguard the Truth possessed by the church. But to say safe guard does not necessarily mean an unbroken building of information. Dogma and doctrine develop, dogma and doctrine could be defocused or even conceivably be lost if it was not helpful for us at a given time because of our postlapsarian state. This position is not completely untenable, one only needs to understand knowledge specific doctrines and dogmas is much like knowledge of the Law. Article 1963 of the Catechism states,
According to Christian tradition, the Law is holy, spiritual, and good,14 yet still imperfect. Like a tutor it shows what must be done, but does not of itself give the strength, the grace of the Spirit, to fulfill it. Because of sin, which it cannot remove, it remains a law of bondage. According to St. Paul, its special function is to denounce and disclose sin, which constitutes a "law of concupiscence" in the human heart.16 However, the Law remains the first stage on the way to the kingdom. It prepares and disposes the chosen people and each Christian for conversion and faith in the Savior God. It provides a teaching which endures for ever, like the Word of God.
Knowledge in general is extremely useful, but humans will never possess all of it and that should bring comfort not distress. We need to know what we need to know, and thus dogma and doctrine develop as we need to understand given our situation. We need the information of revelation in order to relate to God properly, but the important thing that Christ brought, was justification and abidance in the spirit, proper relationship with God. Thus the magisterium can function and, in the Spirit, provide appropriate focus and memory necessary for the condition of the Church.
Once appropriate information is in play, what one needs if the necessary material. The natural elements noted connect to our meta narrative in Christianity. As we discussed above there are three very important people in the bible that relate to the vocational sacraments. “In the Catholic tradition the vocational sacraments are Marriage and Priesthood. Each of these are life vocations. The two people of marriage and the one person of the priest key into three pivotal people in the Christian story, Adam and Eve for the marriage as the living icon of the trinity, and Christ for the Priest.” Now we can add to that the elements of the Garden, the water of the rivers, the fruit and grain of the vine and ground. The elemental matter of the sacral system is composed of our environment and interestingly it is all consumable. This simple fact harkens to to time that there was a need to save humanity and preserve what was necessary for God’s plan to survive, the time of Noah.
When one compares his story with that of Utnapishtim, the generative flood story, the mesopotamian hero bring provisions for human survival as well as materials necessary for the survival of civilization. This is typical of destruction stories throughout human history, the hero often brings things to sustain civilization as well as life. But Noah only brings things created by God for human companionship and survival. This is relatable to our question, how much can you strip away and retain what is necessary for Christianity. The answer goes beyond any semblance of human civilization all the way back to what God provided at the beginning.
Sacral Material Interchange According to Natural and Divine Alchemy
Thus far we have discussed the material needed but the next question is why are these particular items so important? Why not others? Once again, we could turn to proof texting from the Bible and find satisfying answers. But we have amply demonstrated that this is a cart placed before the horse. The point of this section is to show why these particular material are important. That scripture attests to their important is an example of the spiritual end of what Christianity needs, the deposit of faith. But why these elements, three people, two males one female, wheat flour, water, olive oil, and grape wine?
One way of approaching the question concerns Christian ontology. The Christian ontological worldview, which is informed by our understanding of the Trinity. This worldview asserts that Things can be simple and manifold at the same time. With the window of sacramental matter one begins to see the interrelatedness of all fundamental sacral matter and a sign of the interrelatedness of all of the cosmos. Ontologically, any given “thing” that exists is many and one at the same time, yet we are going to focus on how things are able to presence one another and be born out of one another. There is a constant shifting from one form to another in a sort cosmic alchemy. This alchemy exists as part of the natural. But it is also evidenced by a host of divine miracles [deist definition] in the scriptures some of which we will reference.
First we will explore what we will call natural alchemy, that is, the way that in nature things seem to shift form constantly. In the beginning was water. God creates through his Word and draws all that is out of this water. Each other example of fundamental sacral matter naturally and scientifically has its origin in water. Humans spring not only from the water of the womb, but from the waters of the planet as well, as did all life. Water falls from the heavens, seeps into the ground, enters a seed and becomes grapes, olives, and wheat. Humans consume the bread, the water, the wine, the oil and it sustains their being and becomes one with them. Humans die and dissolve into the ground and into the water, and are consumed by the plants becoming them.
When we say divine alchemy, we are discussing the miraculous changes discussed in scriptures. But it must be remembered by the reader that in a sacramental cosmology, all of reality is a miracle, thus to discuss a “miracle” by a more deistic definition is simply to focus on this or that particular instance of the entire cosmos which coheres in concert as one great miracle. Hence many of the miraculous interchanges displayed in the Bible are not miraculous in terms of uniqueness, but more in the matter of time, timing, and circumstances.
As we have said, water does become blood according to natural alchemy, as living things spring from it over the millennia of evolution and all reality is drawn from it in the mythic first creation story. It also becomes blood according to natural alchemy when you drink it. Yet the Exodus story is extraordinary in its time frame, timing, and circumstances. It changes immediately, it changes at the invocation of Moses and it changes without the circumstances necessary for natural alchemy. One purpose here is to call to mind the sacral nature of all reality, not that God can break the most seemingly impossible rules to break, but that the rules are a beauty in and of themselves and we have a lot to learn about them. The absurdity of the comic example noted earlier, “if a fish crawls out of water and talks, there’s no God” is indicative of the same temporal trope. Blood and water are signs, as opposed to symbols, of life. The reader will remember that in sacramental discourse, a symbol is something that stands for something else. Again, a sign in sacramental discourse, effects the thing it symbolizes. Water and blood symbolize and effect life. Both water and blood are signs of life, they “symbolize” it, yet they also affect it and we owe our existence to their mediation of the power of God.
The same dynamic plays out in the change from water to wine as well as the change from wine to blood. These miracles are quite common according to natural alchemy. Water falls from the heavens is drunk by the vines and becomes grapes, which, by the work of human hands, becomes wine. Wine is consumed by the human and becomes blood when the blood absorbs it and causes drunkenness. Again the water to wine at Cana and the changing of wine to blood at the last supper were miracles of divine alchemy, but the miracles were not instances of complete uniqueness. Rather, they were miracles of time frame, timing, and circumstances. They happened immediately, at Jesus’ command and outside of the normal circumstances required by natural alchemy.
Again there are lessons to learn here, and one is that life is amazing in and of itself, but there is more, there is extasis. When water becomes wine and wine becomes blood in appropriate circumstances ecstasis is what we get. That water becomes wine is the sign that God is willing to provide the avenues for extasis. It also shows that we have a part to play in that process according to natural alchemy, wine is from “fruit of the vine and work of human hands” which must then be drunk in order to provide the experience. In the entire set up God provides all that is necessary and we do our small part to “buy in”. The natural and divine alchemy of water to wine and wine to blood are signs of grace, will, their appropriate union, and ecstasy. The alchemic changes symbolizes these things, yet at the same time they effect them by the ecstatic enjoyed under the right circumstances.
This leads to the other species of the Eucharist and the center of the Christian faith, the bread, which is the Body of Christ. Once again, by natural alchemy, bodies do become bread in as much as in death we deteriorate into the ground and our dissolution feeds the wheat that is ground to become the bread. By this interrelation of life and death according to the natural alchemy, we are introduced to the miracle of divine alchemy, once again, a difference of time, timing and circumstances. It happens immediately as opposed to the normal span of deterioration, it happens in the context of the liturgical prayers and not in the ordinary circumstances.
The bread is a sign of life, it effects what it symbolizes, in this case both physically and spiritually. Christ’s death brings us life, just as bread, which is prefigured by the natural alchemy of the death dissolution and new life, which gives life.
The last sacral material to be discussed is oil. In the ancient world it is salve, a healing ointment and restore health. In scriptures, it also is used to denote a change in character, and fulfillment of vocation. Thus when one becomes a king or a priest, they are anointed and the anointing effects the fulfillment of their destiny. Our destiny is to be in proper relationship with God, that is, to be able to live as we were meant to be without hinderance. Thus the oil is used to effect the sacraments that heal and fulfill our destiny, anointing and confirmation.
All of these material elements play a part in a complex interchange that hints at the deep meanings of theodicy, life, meaning, and death. The entirety of salvation history leading up to the coming of the messiah prepared humanity for the sacral system he would fulfill by naturally attuning us to the interplay and usefulness of all of these signs and symbols. When the Messiah finally did come, he rebuilds the temple of his body in three days, and extends that temple to include the assembly of the people as the stones and the ritual system as their lives.
We began this treatise by exploring the philosophical and theological ways that we have become a religion that is focused on texts as opposed to ritual. We then discussed the need for humanity to encounter God through calculated ritual and explained this by means of primordial sacraments and panhuman ritual archetypes. The next section discussed the unfolding of this ritual structure through salvation history across Judaism and into the Christian religion. In this final section we have explored the essential elements required for the survival of the Christian religion, three human bodies, two female and one male, water, wheat flour, grape wine, and olive oil. We explored how these elements are signs and symbols of natural and divine alchemy and impart to us deep meanings concerning the nature of theodicy, life, purpose, and death.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to help calibrate the debate concerning the fundamentals of what it means to be a Christian and what is necessary to retain in order for Christianity to survive. The intention was to shift focus away from the standard categories of faith versus works or scripture versus tradition and also to shift the standard text based validation of such argument to a cosmological validation. We sought to place the fundamentals of the Christian religion in a context of the sacramental cosmology that has existed throughout Christian history and connect it to the basic symbolic elements present in the primordial sacrament as applied to the structures of the panhuman ritual archetypes and then distill the elements of that ritual structure down to its most basic parts..
We began with an attempt to lay out the basic trajectory of thought that led to the desacralization of of the cosmos by western culture, along with a basic introduction of what sacramental cosmology. We began by showing how the protestant reformation moved the focus of the Christian religion away from a holistic experience and toward a text based religion. This is in opposition to the ancient view of Christianity, lex orandi lex credendi, which gives priority to lived experience over cognitive experiences. We then briefly traced a philosophical trajectory that began in the enlightenment. This development of thought lead to a desacralized view of reality we called a deistic cosmology. This cosmology was born out of the strict empirical as well as atomistic view coupled with a focus on the creator understanding. We then balanced that view with a sustainor understanding of God and widened our understanding of creation from a mechanism that demonstrates occasional miracles in order to give the rational mind an assent to God, to an entire communication instructed to speak to the entire person.
After this we covered the general anthropological and biblical outlook that traces out our deep human need for calculated ritual in general. This included why, in a post lapsarian world, calculated ritual is necessary given the Fall. We then parsed three primordial sacraments, Creation, Marriage, and Christ, that set the stage for all of reality being a complex communication system of divine love. From those primordial sacraments we then set up a system of panhuman ritual archetypes that are a matrix for the multicultural variations of calculated ritual. These were growth rituals, sacrificial rituals, healing rituals, and vocational investitures.
In the next section we generally traced the Jewish roots of the sacramental nature of ancient Christianity. These roots started with the first sacrifice of Cain and Abel, and developed into systems of sacrifice among both the gentiles and the Jews. The Jewish sacrificial system was the ordinary form, containing rituals falling under all four categories of the panhuman ritual archetypes until Christianity brought their ritual system to the Gentile world by means of the messiah. At that point the temple complex housing the divine presence and the system of calculated ritual transitioned from brick and mortar to the living structure of the assembly. This allows for a diversity of ritual expression based on the nation's families and cultures of the gentile world based on their covenant with God through Noah.
In the final section we have explored the essential elements required for the survival of the Christian religion, three human bodies, two female and one male, which constitute the matter for the vocational sacraments. Also the sacral materials of water, wheat flour, grape wine, and olive oil are necessary for the signs in order to develop an effective system of calculated ritual. We explored how these elements are signs and symbols of natural and divine alchemy and how their change in form according to divine alchemy speaks to the miraculous nature of natural alchemy. We also explored how each of these elements and transformations impart to us deep meanings concerning the nature of theodicy, life, purpose, and death.
The conclusion of our process is an understanding of the importance of the sacrificial system that humanity engages in as the supreme way that we show devotion, gratitude and love to God and God alone after the fall. In the sacrificial system of Christianity we are living sacrifices, and all that we do is dedicated to God, which would have been the state of original justice where the man lived this intuitively without any sense of “giving over” because God’s providence and paternity was assumed. Because of the fall we have the person of Christ who mediates the divine to us in the postlapsarian state. It is to him as our great high priest that we offer all of our lives as a living sacrifice, just as he offered his life and his death for us.
Each of the sacramental elements that go on to encompass the calculated ritual of the sacral system in the church was offered to Christ in the fundamental stories of the New Testament. Three human bodies were necessary to maintain Christianity, two to marry and one to ordain through whom the other bodies can offer sacrifice to God through Christ as he stands in persona christi. A human body was offered to Christ by Mary’s fiat. Water is offered to Christ by John the Baptist when he baptised him in the Jordan. Oil is offered to Christ by the penitent woman who covered him with oil against the protest of Judas. Wine was offered to him as he hung on the cross by the soldiers. Lastly, bread is offered to him by the Apostles or the child before the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.
Each of these offering narratives, sets the Christian myth in such a way as to make the items essential to our sacrificial system as we develop them into the public and promulgated liturgy of the church. From there the ritual life of the church spreads to the paraliturgical ritual of the community or the ritual life of any given domestic church. All of this together forms a temple of living stones that is dedicated to offering all actions, pragmatic and ritual, to the glory of God. This outpouring of love for God and neighbor is the foundation of the Christian religion.
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