The Structure of...Everything

Among the historically minded, the title "defender of the faith" can hardly be separated from the irony of Henry VIII. For a long time this sort of "defender" was supposed to be a person able to engage skillfully in the art of apologetics: laying out the reasons to believe what the Catholic Church believes and teaches, more often than not against Protestants. In the 21st century, few things could be less interesting than equipping oneself to duke it out with Evangelicals: that’s not where the action’s at. At the same time few things are more urgent than giving a cynical, self-destructing world the lifeline of hope that’s faith in Christ. Are we in a bind or what? Giving reasons to believe has to take a new tack. 

There is a certain way, however, that Catholics have viewed the world and lived in it that has stood the test of time and proved to be the recipe for…sanity (who’d suspect that would ever be in short supply?) But we don't usually talk about worldviews, just because they're everything: too big to miss, and sometimes even to notice.

It is certainly refreshing to watch outsiders to faith stumble into the sanity of the Biblical mindset; it's why we are still enthralled to listen to Jordan Peterson's often inaccurate, psychological-evolutionary commentaries on Old Testament passages because the clinical diagnosis he gives them is: "this approach to life is actually healthy." More recent still are Shia LaBeouf's reasons for converting from a chaotic acting life to Catholic, among them the recognition of "suffering as a gift."

It's probably why the Judeo-Christian engagement with reality remains something of an "open secret" even while it's the Church's most convincing witness, its nearly forgotten ace-in-the-hole for preaching the truth of Christ to every new generation. It is the inheritance of all believers reaching back into the Old Testament...

This is what we'll call the sacramental worldview: the recognition of God reaching us through his creation. Something that strikes us as both obvious and marvelous. 

To appreciate why so plain a concept is something to get excited about, you must bear with me for a moment, because the tone is about to get nerdy. But we'll bring this little detour back full circle, scout's honor.

We all need intelligibility to be wedded to reality. This sense-making, pattern-finding ability we all have that's called rationality: it's got to correspond -somehow- to the world outside our heads. We intuit that idealism (considering reality purely a projection of my mind) doesn't work. Instead, we keep suspecting that intelligibility really does map out reality, only we can't prove it: trying to always presupposes the conclusion...

That makes the tenuous but much-desired correspondence between mind and reality is one, big, fat act of faith; not faith in God, just faith in being - that's it's reliable, stable, and above all, meaning-ful. Theoretical physicists are so firm in their faith of said correspondence (in this case between mathematics and matter) that they confidently posit the necessary existence of yet-undiscovered phenomena like worm holes and dark energy. But there's a corollary: if the mind-world nexus is sound, allowing us to call things "true," and we don't actually live in a matrix or a cosmic bad joke, then being must also be good. It's good because I can navigate among matter, and arrange it to keep myself alive. And being's source, God, must obviously be good too, even though how his omnipotence and my freedom don't overlap remained mysterious. 

The quandaries that came with the faith in being-as-intelligible and good became too much to ask for skeptical modern philosophers, starting with Descartes: "I'm going to ground all certainties with my mind as the starting point" was the basic premise of his dictum cogito ergo sum. It smacks of the idealism mentioned above, and yet, Descartes smuggled in God through the back door of his system, because he realized something had to guarantee the truth of his own thoughts.

The thing is, every honest thinker knows you need an absolute as the basis of thought; there must be a stable background context upon which a fact is interpreted in order to become meaningful. But every philosopher since Descartes only dug the idealism rabbit-hole deeper and deeper: Immanuel Kant called objective real stuff the noumenon, which to our minds is inaccessible, so we only work with the phenomenon or how it appears subjectively. Georg Hegel creates a majestic metaphysical system where everything real is a product of a great, evolving consciousness, making subjectivity king.

Friedrich Nietzsche is a unique figure, bringing up the rear of this intellectual parade in the 1860's and discovered that while every European had bought into these radically destabilizing ideas, they still behaved according to older, stable thought patterns, like where being casually flowed from a loving God, upon which civilization rested. His "God is dead" rant was meant to awaken everyone to the impending doom that would hit upon realization that there was no absolute upon which to ground anything (morals, truth claims, knowledge).

He busied himself writing about the survivors of this post-apocalypse as the "last men" or Übermensch, who could live without truth or moral value of any sort - a difficult fate indeed. Yet his acute mind detected the inconsistency: "I fear we have not gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar." Nietzsche saw that simply speaking words, whose definitions we presuppose point to something real outside of ourselves, requires an absolute; and denying it vitiates the possibility of any communication to actually signify things. The postmodern deconstructionists like Derrida and Foucault saw this dilemma, but were not consistent: they used language to vitiate it of any meaning, and the proverbial snake ate its tail.

That was quite the detour, and we circle back to our main point, but now equipped with the understanding of why the traditional, medieval "bottom-up" Christian truth claims of reasoning from creatures to God's existence could scarcely take root in 20th century intellectual soil: idealism had already run its devastating course, naturalist explanations of phenomena were all the rage, and it caught the Church, culturally, on her heels.

But few suspected that her ace-in-the-hole arguments had not been played for quite some time, roughly since the days of the Church Fathers. I refer to a top-down approach to discover God found in what we call the sacramental structure of reality. It's not your traditional "proof" that arrives to God's existence as the conclusion (which never really works); instead we find him at the beginning. What we're hoping to achieve is, by tracing God through creation, we simultaneously find a firm basis for the truth of knowledge to rest upon. No small task!

So for starters, what's a sacramental? It is a finite, physical reality through which the infinite God makes himself present and calls for man's response. If we look at where the word comes from, the Latin sacramentum comes from the Greek μυστήριον (mysterion) that in the Old Testament referred to "ultimate reality veiled beneath symbols." That puts sacramentals squarely in the category of sacred symbols. The same term in the New Testament, however (Mk.4, Rm.14, Eph.1, Col.1), only and always referred to the ultimate mystery of Christ crucified, who delivers what all previous mysteries could not: entry to the heart of God himself, mediated to mankind through Christ. This is what's behind the affirmation "mediation is Catholic."

So if we're saying reality itself is structured like a sacramental, we're saying that infinite and finite have to come together wherever truth and meaning are to be found. But what does that look like - what ordinary experiences are sacramental without me knowing it? An example is the experience of love and freedom - anything that constitutes a call to the conscience. It shines through these particular facets of experience:

• It is experienced as an absolute demand upon one which relativizes everything else, and requires that I transcend my own limits, even unto giving one's life.
• It is supra-rational: you can’t rationally persuade anyone to honor its infinite scope and lay their life on the line, but nor is it irrational, as love demands a commitment in full consciousness and freedom.
• It is personal: only other free persons -not abstract principles- can be on the receiving end, since they are the only adequate recipients of this response.
• It is both free and liberating - I am never more fully myself when, paradoxically, I submit to the obligation of love, which is experienced as a should, not a must, placing it squarely beyond nature. One is willing to do what’s right because it’s right.
• Lastly, as an afterthought, the one who loves desires both complete union with the beloved and still demands the fully-established alterity of the beloved - he will not suffer her to be absorbed or diminished as "other" in any way.

The first thing you notice about these facets is they all contain something of a paradox, a tension that's sustained in the relation of opposite poles (infinite-finite, absolute-relative, freedom-duty). It doesn't take much effort to notice that this tension in the experience of love is also reflected in both rational thinking and free choosing which likewise demands the background infinite (=matter, indeterminate, possibility) to interpret the finite (=form, definite, actuality) that occurs in pretty much everything: from realizing I can't ground my own existence to wrestling with my mind's capacity to know. That's why it makes sense to flip the equation around and say reality has a sacramental structure: our everyday stuff is sustained by mystery. 

So why do we pick love as the specimen of analysis? Because it's experientially prior: you know love long before you're capable of abstract thought. So if love undoubtedly places me in touch with reality as its other-centeredness gives meaning to life, then reason -which mimics love's structure- can also really be in touch with reality, and so truth really is possible! Wow. That idea that love justifies reason is older than we think: its embedded in the ancient Hebrew word for truth: emet. It means fidelity; you're faithful to a person. That connotation let's me see reality as a gift.

Every sacramental encounter is revelatory, and that includes all symbolic experiences, not just the "religious stuff." You know those people who seem to see God in everything? They're not easy to live with; even the most banal happenings seem to contain for them a moral imperative. Yet there's something to learn from this demographic (which must certainly be 90% grandmothers): I've got to let the natural symbol (any truly human experience) mediate its inner meaning, undisturbed by my preferences, to me. In a word, we've got to let revelation happen: meaning cannot be foisted upon our minds - it's always found. God speaks, but what small percentage of his words end up resonating! 

On the flipside, I remember someone once said a thing is mature only when it becomes a sacrament (and that includes people!)  Think of what that could mean for you: whoever crosses your path is arrested by sweetness, peace, goodness. That entails a reflective and responsive way of life: every human person is already sacramental, but some seem to really own it: they've let God communicate so freely to them that He uninhibitedly speaks through them. 

The astute reader asks at this point whether we are dumbing down the seven sacraments to just a few more symbols among many others. Not so fast. Sacramentality flows in an archetypal way from the sacred humanity of the Son -why it makes sense to call Jesus Christ The Sacrament par excellence- it's the kind that not only calls to me (literally: "come, follow me!") but actually transforms me, because his physical body perfectly mediates the fullness of God. Insofar as the Church is the extension of Christ's mystical body in time, she is also called -by intimate participation- the universal sacrament of salvation (Lumen Gentium 48); as she was engendered in and by the Eucharistic mystery, the re-presentation of her Lord's Redemption happens wherever she is at. The Eucharist is a further iteration of the "sacramentalizing" that the Incarnation already is, and the central hub around which the other sacraments are arrayed as their eschatological referent and goal.

So what's the end game of all this? That my free response allow me to be united to the One mediated to me through those creatures that are channels of grace. The absoluteness of the call to love is grounded in the concreteness of Jesus, and in Him my poor love is not lost, but validated and completed. Recognizing God at the root of the nostalgic draw in the symbolisms of every culture -an evocative speech, a funeral monument, a national anthem- feels profoundly Christian.

Musing upon possible takeaways, two ideas come to mind.

Let us never disregard the body's role in spirituality; it's that by which we participate in Christ, and through which we love Him: "glorify God in your body" (1Cor.6:20). He will speak to me precisely through my fatigue, pain, tranquility. Let's remember Saint John Paul's Theology of the Body -laying out the sacramental truth of marital love- was a revolutionary thing when it shouldn't have been!

Don't underestimate the physical reality of the sacred liturgy! It's the extension of the mystery of Jesus' Redemption in time and space, and that the Church rightfully arranges its symbolic and sacramental elements to express faithfully the Christ event, to proclaim his personal presence among us. There will always be the temptation to personalize, co-opt, or even concoct liturgical rites to our liking, but no - let us serve the liturgy, and her quiet eloquence will faithfully enter us into the mystery of God who longs to transform us into his likeness, even while establishing us in our uniqueness. Any other takeaways?