244. Why sacraments are visible
244. WHY SACRAMENTS ARE VISIBLE
Why must sacraments be visible and material rather than invisible and spiritual?
Sensible (sensory, visible, material) things are required for the sacraments.
Divine wisdom provides for each thing according to its mode. . . . Now it is part of man’s nature to acquire knowledge of the intelligible from the sensible. But a sign is that by means of which one attains to the knowledge of something else. Consequently, since the sacred things which are signified by the sacraments are the spiritual and intelligible goods by means of which man is sanctified, it follows that the sacramental signs consist in sensible things. . . . [H]ence it is that sensible things are required for the sacraments (III,60,4).
The answer to the question is very simple: because we are visible and material creatures. The sacraments are for us, provided for us by divine Wisdom, which “provides for each thing according to its mode (nature)”. God gives to His angels light (His mind), to His animals food, and to us sacraments.
For we are not pure spirits who happen to be trapped in bodies. We are not even spirits who only have bodies, for we do not have bodies as we have possessions. We are bodies as well as souls. We can’t take our body off as we can take our clothes off. Between our death and the resurrection of the body we are incomplete, like a program stored in a computer or like music on a sheet of paper, or like a poem in the poet’s mind.
(“Souls” are not the same as “spirits”, though both are something other than bodies. A soul is a spirit that is the life of a physical body. Angels are spirits but not souls, because they have no bodies. Animals are not spirits; they have living souls but not rational souls, not intellectual and moral souls, because they are not spiritual beings. They are only biological beings, angels are only spiritual beings, and we are both. A spirit is intellectual and moral, i.e., an intellect and will. Animals have non-intellectual and non-moral souls, which are the life of their bodies; angels are spirits but not souls, since they have no bodies; and we have both intellectual and moral souls and physical bodies.)
Because we have bodies as well as intellects, our intellects acquire truth through the experiences of our body and its senses. These sensations are signs of intelligible truths. A sign is not itself the truth known by the mind, but points to it, directs the mind to it. For instance, an image is a sign. The image of a star twinkling in earth’s atmosphere is a sign that there is a real star far above the atmosphere. The image of a human body reflected in a mirror is a sign that a real human being, body and soul, is there. The image or figure of a triangle drawn on paper is not a triangle but only a sign of a triangle, since a triangle is composed of three one-dimensional lines, whereas all the lines that we draw on paper are visible and therefore two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. Angels understand trigonometry without any such physical signs.
“Sensible things are required for the sacraments” because sensible things are required for all human knowledge. Without sensible images to begin with, we could know nothing.
In a broad sense, all the miracles God performed to reveal His supernatural power, justice, wisdom, and mercy, are sacramental signs. In a narrower sense, Christ instituted seven special sacramental signs to communicate divine grace directly to the faithful, and these are “the seven sacraments of the Church”. They are to the soul what food is to the body.