Newman, Ratzinger, and the Sacramental Principle: A Reflection on Sacramental Formation

Most clergy, Christian educators, and parents are aware of the challenges facing evangelization and catechesis in our world today. The rise of secularism has left many Christians with an inadequate understanding of who God is and how God relates to us. Scientism and materialism have limited the scope of our worldview to exclude the divine, and therefore the anthropology for many in today’s world does not account for the God-human relationship. In other words, that humans are made in the image of God, and thus we are made to relate to God in a very real (ontological) way has been lost from the way we understand what and who we are. Similarly, the turn away from religion in many Western cultures has made it difficult for many to relate to the ancient rituals and spiritual practices that have nourished Christians for millennia. Many challenges outlined just now resonated with St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and Joseph Ratzinger (1927–2022), even though they lived in different historical and ecclesial contexts.

It is imperative that Christians today seek a deeper understanding of a sacramental worldview in order to dispel the temptation to see them as magical or outdated human inventions. Despite very real challenges within our contemporary culture, the Church maintains that a sacramental worldview is at the heart of the Christian life. These challenges brought on by the shift to secularization can make it difficult to know where to begin when evangelizing and catechizing. This is particularly poignant when one thinks through how to prepare our youth and children, as well as adult catechumens and candidates for the sacraments of initiation.

What follows is a reflection on how Saint John Henry Newman and Joseph Ratzinger can help our Church today think sacramentally when the culture tells us to think otherwise. The writings of Newman and Ratzinger concerning the sacramental principle offer a unique framework for conceptualizing the sacraments in a manner that simultaneously reflects upon the Christian understanding of God, creation, the human person, and salvation with greater immediacy.

Broadly conceived, the sacramental principle is the Catholic teaching that the presence of God can be found in the ordinary aspects of life and that creation can reflect God’s presence and even be chosen by God to communicate divine life in the sacraments. "The importance of the sacraments in the Christian life cannot be underestimated as they are the ordinary means instituted by Jesus to communicate the graces they signify (CCC 1127–1129). They are necessary for a mature relationship with God, including the prayer life and moral living involved in that relationship (cf. CCC 1076, 1692, 2558). When thinking sacramentally, it is important to hold together the grace and power of the sacraments themselves (ex opere operato) with the disposition and cooperation of the recipients (ex opere operantis) of the sacraments. It is in holding these two principles together that the person receiving the sacraments can begin to understand that the sacraments are how we participate in and with the grace of God. This emphasis on the relationship between the Christian and God has all but disappeared from our culture, so it is imperative that we read the great teachers of the Church when they speak about how we can come to know the invisible God.

John Henry Newman and the Sacramental Principle

Newman reflected on how he conceptualized the sacramental principle as an Anglican in his Apologia pro Vita Sua. He found support for it in both the church fathers and in more contemporary works.1 This sacramental principle is a way of understanding “the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal,” or how the material world can guide us toward God.2 Newman explains that the world, which is both “physical and historical,” points beyond itself. Likening nature to a parable, Newman argues that through our senses, the visible world can lead to the invisible. We see a similar parallel in Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology, when he writes: “Only because creation is parable can it become the word of parable.”3 Both authors demonstrate a common worldview here, and it is known that Ratzinger read copious amounts of Newman’s writings, so perhaps he was reflecting on Newman’s Apologia as he wrote these words. Newman’s sacramental principle is articulated more succinctly when he explains that it is “the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen.”4 The sacramental principle accounts for our access to the invisible world through participation in the sacraments. Newman notes that this is a view of reality is shared by Anglicans and Catholics in their view of the instituted sacraments and in their broader sacramental vision of reality.

Newman shares an incarnational view of the sacramental principle with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Newman writes that the Incarnation is the archetype of the sacramental principle in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.5 Similarly, the Catechism explains that the Incarnation refers to the Eternal Son of the Father becoming man and that “without losing his divine nature he has assumed human nature” (CCC 479). The catechism also teaches that “the Incarnation is … the mystery of the wonderful union of the divine and human natures in the one person of the Word” (CCC 483). In the person of Jesus is found the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and the finite, the invisible and visible, and the immaterial and material. Newman writes that “the doctrine of the Incarnation is the announcement of a divine gift conveyed in a material and visible medium, it being thus that heaven and earth are in the Incarnation united. That is, it establishes in the very idea of Christianity the sacramental principle as its characteristic.”6 The Incarnation, the “central truth”7 of Christianity, both confirms and furthers the sacramental principle within God’s plan for the salvation of the world. The Incarnation is the most apparent and generous moment of God’s desire to reach us in humanity and not in spite of it.

Newman must spell out the difference between the created and the Creator. Newman writes that the sacramental principle determines that matter is “capable of sanctification,”8 but he also notes that there are distinctions between God and creation, the goodness of creation, and the fall:

Christianity began by considering Matter as a creature of God, and in itself “very good.” It taught that Matter, as well as Spirit, had become corrupt, in the instance of Adam; and it contemplated its recovery. It taught that the Highest had taken a portion of that corrupt mass upon Himself, in order to the sanctification of the whole; that, as a firstfruits of His purpose, He had purified from all sin that very portion of it which He took into His Eternal Person, and thereunto had taken it from a Virgin Womb, which He had filled with the abundance of His Spirit.9

These truths about God, creation, sin, and the impact of the Incarnation can be communicated by appealing to the sacramental principle.

Joseph Ratzinger and the Sacramental Principle

The Incarnation and the sacraments point to a particular understanding of reality. The sacraments initiate the Christian into communion with God and the Church and into salvation history. Through our participation in the sacramental life of the Church, the Christian is able to develop a sacramental world view, which Joseph Ratzinger explores in “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence.” Ratzinger contrasts the materialist worldview, in which “the world is regarded as matter and matter as material,” with the “sacramental principle,” which matter can potentially point to immaterial reality.10 One can also look at this in the reverse order, which can be pastorally beneficial. This is to say that the sacramental principle stands in contradiction to the error(s) of secular materialism because it introduces the world of matter as being a “symbolic transparency of reality toward the eternal.”11 Though the world is not God, the world points to God. The sacramental principle and its worldview reveal the following truth: “Things are more than things.”12

The seven sacraments in particular demonstrate that God is present and active, rather than distant and aloof, as is the god of deism.13 Ratzinger saw within the sacramental principle a means of nurturing an anthropology that puts humans in direct relationship with God, which is much healthier for the Christian than the secularist counterpart.14 Issues such as the body, the soul, mediation, sin, grace, creatureliness, history, individuality, and community all enter the conversation. While some may idealize a purely mental or emotional engagement with God, the sacraments appeal to the human senses because “God encounters man in a human way.”15 It is an act of divine condescension that is found in scripture and is analogously experienced by loving parents and educators in every culture. The Incarnation and the sacraments—indeed all of salvation history—rebuff not only secular materialism, but also certain gnostic tendencies espoused even by some believers today. Ratzinger explains that “the error of anti-sacramental idealism consists in the fact that it wants to make man into a pure spirit in God’s sight. Instead of a man, the only thing remaining is a ghost that does not exist.”16 God revealed the sacraments because of the Creator/creature relationship. God created humans as sensory beings; therefore, the invisible God interacts with us through our senses.

Conclusion

Examples throughout salvation history help to illustrate the sacramental principle, which is God’s appeal to humanity in a human way. God speaks and converses with Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses in words they can understand. He speaks through the prophets. He gives the Law, recorded in human language and on material tablets, to the Israelites. He institutes rituals, sacrifices, festival days, and holy places. He speaks through dreams using human words or the images one first finds in life. He is encountered in a burning bush, a wrestled angel, miracles, and the many supernatural moments in the life of Israel. All of these examples begin to develop a divine pattern of the invisible God engaging corporeal humanity. More specifically, the pattern demonstrates how God stoops to the level of our materiality as a way to show the Creator knows and loves the creation.

This divine pattern eventually culminates in the Incarnation. In Jesus’s ministry the pattern continues but with greater clarity and immediacy in his message of salvation for the world. One only needs to think of the many human words he spoke, the power passing through his body and garment to the hemorrhaging woman, the divine splendor shining through at the transfiguration, Jesus’s use of laying on of hands or mud or spit to heal, the use of common human foods to feed both the spiritual and material needs of his people, and the role of his humanity in the Paschal Mystery to see how the Incarnation is the epicenter of God’s revelation of himself to creation.

A divine pattern found in salvation history establishes the general sacramental world view and provides a framework for understanding the seven particular sacraments instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church. It can be a daunting task to explain to congregants or students why God would set up a sacramental system at all, and even more daunting to do so by appealing to Israel’s own ritual system for those unfamiliar with the biblical corpus or worldview. They may not know of the biblical tradition, or may struggle to believe it, and may also be wrestling with inadequacies in their view of God, the human person, or the meaning of life. Yet, it is this idea demonstrated in the writings of Newman and Ratzinger that offers theological insights and pastoral aid. Whether in a homily or a set of sacramental preparation meetings, there is only so much time. For those particularly wounded by the anti-Christian worldviews prominent today, an appeal to the idea of a sacramental principle helps to explain why and how we are able to be in relationship with God through the sacramental rituals. A sacramental worldview also provides an opportunity to reflect more deeply on God and the human person and how we are able to know God. The sacramental principle offers congregants “an interpretation of the world, of man, and of God that is convinced of the fact that things are not just things and material for our labor; rather, they are at the same time signs pointing beyond themselves of that divine love toward which they become transparent for someone who has sight.”17 Not only can the sacramental principle assist in the formation process in preparation for a given sacrament, but a faithful participation in the sacraments of the Church can help to initiate and deepen one’s sacramental worldview.

1 Newman mentions such formative works as Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature and John Keble’s The Christian Year. See Newman, Apo (Doubleday, 1956), 138–39.

2 Newman, Apo, 145.

3 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (Ignatius, 1987), 345.

4 Newman, Apo, 139.

5 Newman, Dev (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 93–94.

6 Newman, Dev, 325.

7 Newman, Dev, 324.

8 Newman, Dev, 326.

9 Newman, Dev, 401-402.

10 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 153–54.

11 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 153–54.

12 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 161.

13 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 161.

14 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 155.

15 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 158.

16 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 166.

17 Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 161.