The Liturgy of the Sacraments

Extract

To understand the sacramental principle, it is necessary to recall the Plan of Redemption. God, three Persons, knowing and loving each other, exists from all eternity. When he chose to create other beings out of nothing, there was but one model, himself. Therefore, each creature is a unique reflection of God. It is itself and, at the same time, it is, to intelligent beings, a revelation of God. This quality of being real yet symbolic makes every creature, in the wide sense of the Latin word, a sacramentum, or, in Greek, a ‘mystery’. The correct attitude towards creatures saves their dignity from two false extremes. Some people would make each creature an absolute in itself—unrelated to anything else, no more than its physical constituents. The opposite error limits the creature to its function of symbol, ignores its value as an individual reality, credits it only for the power to suggest something else. Saint John Chrysostom has neatly described the creature as sacrament: ‘that of which one aspect is seen and the other aspect is believed’.