246. Sacraments and grace
246. SACRAMENTS AND GRACE
The essential Protestant objection to the Catholic theology of the sacraments is this: How can material sacraments cause spiritual grace? The effect seems greater than the cause.
Sacraments are sacred signs. Signs are symbols, which are formal causes. But to say that the sacraments actually give grace makes them efficient causes. Is this not a confusion between two different kinds of causality? Is it not superstitious to mistake the sign for the thing signified? Isn’t that like loving a person’s picture instead of the person? Isn’t it faith that makes us one with Christ?
The power of Christ’s Passion is joined to us through faith and through the sacraments, in different ways; for the contact which is through faith takes place through the act of the soul, but the contact which is through the sacraments takes place through the use of material things (III,62,6).
Objection: It seems that the sacraments are not the cause of grace. For it seems that the same thing is not both sign and cause. . . . But a sacrament is a sign of grace. Therefore it is not its cause.
Reply: The sacraments of the New Law are both cause and signs. Hence too it is that, to use the common expression, they effect what they signify. . . . [T]hey perfectly fulfill the conditions of a sacrament, being ordained to something sacred not only as a sign but also as a cause.
Through the sacraments of the New Law man is incorporated with Christ; thus the Apostle says of Baptism (Gal 3:27): As many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ. And man is made a member of Christ by grace alone.
Some, however, say that they are the causes of grace not by their own operation but in so far as God causes grace in the soul when the sacraments are employed. And they give as an example a man who on presenting a leaden coin (the ancient version of a modern check) receives, by the king’s command, a hundred pounds: not as though the leaden coin, by any operation of its own, caused him to be given that sum of money, this being the effect of the mere will of the king . . . For the leaden coin is nothing but a sign of the king’s command that this man should receive money. . . . Hence, according to this opinion the sacraments of the New Law would be mere signs of grace, whereas we have it on the authority of many saints that the sacraments of the New Law not only signify but also cause grace.
We must therefore say . . . that none but God can cause grace, since grace is nothing else than a participated likeness of the divine nature, according to 2 Peter 1:4: He hath given us most great and precious promises, that we may be partakers of the divine nature. But the instrumental cause (as distinct from the principal cause) works not by the power of its form (its own nature), but only by the motion whereby it is moved by the principal agent, so that the effect is not likened to the instrument but to the principal agent. . . . And it is thus that the sacraments of the New Law cause grace; for they are instituted by God to be employed for the purpose of conferring grace. . . (III,62,1).
If we hold that a sacrament is an instrumental cause of grace, we must needs allow that there is in the sacraments a certain instrumental power of bringing about the sacramental effects (III,62,4).
The New Testament explicitly says that Baptism saves us (1 Pet 3:21). Baptism (and the other sacraments) must therefore be an effective instrumental cause. The sacraments are symbols, of course—signs—but they are also more than signs or symbols, as the words “I take you for my lawful wedded wife / husband” are signs and symbols of the actual marriage that is taking place but also more than that: they actually effect the marriage. There are other “performative” words like that, e.g., the King or Queen saying “I dub thee knight” or the sheriff saying “I hereby deputize you.”
In the different sacraments God uses different sensory instruments to give grace: words in Matrimony and Confession, bread and wine in the Eucharist, water in Baptism, laying on of hands in priestly consecration, and oil in Confirmation and Extreme Unction or the Sacrament of the Sick.