247. How the sacraments get their power
247. HOW THE SACRAMENTS GET THEIR POWER
Is it simply God’s arbitrary will, like magic, that gives the sacraments their power? Does He just snap His fingers and say “Be” and it is? That’s how He works His miracles in Muslim Ash’arite theology, but that doesn’t sound like the way God works in the sacraments, which are a unique kind of miracle. What is the difference, since both religions agree that God works miracles through created instruments? How does Christ make the difference between Muslim and Christian theology here?
As stated above, a sacrament in causing grace works after the manner of an instrument. Now an instrument is twofold: the one, separate, as a stick, for instance; the other, united, as a hand. Moreover, the separate instrument is moved by means of the united instrument, as a stick by the hand. Now the principal efficient cause of grace is God Himself, in comparison with Whom Christ’s humanity is as a united instrument, whereas the sacrament is as a separate instrument. . . .
Christ delivered us from our sins principally through His passion. . . . Wherefore it is manifest that the sacraments of the Church derive their power specially from Christ’s Passion, the virtue (power) of which is in a manner united to us by our receiving the sacraments. It was in sign of this that from the side of Christ hanging on the Cross there flowed water and blood, the former of which belongs to Baptism, the latter to the Eucharist, which are the principal sacraments (III,62,5).
Most of the Church’s dogmas have been attacked by, not just one but, two kinds of heretics. For even in the natural order, as Aristotle says, there are usually two equal and opposite errors about what is true and what is good. Each practical moral virtue has two opposed vices, a “too much” and a “too little” (e.g., cowardice and foolhardiness, or insensitivity and self-indulgence). Theoretical truth also usually contrasts with two opposite errors, e.g., angelism vs. animalism regarding human nature, or deism vs. pantheism in theology, or the denial of free will vs. the denial of predestination. And so too here, with the sacraments. On the one hand, superstition ascribes supernatural powers to the natural things themselves, not as instruments; and on the other hand, in the typically Muslim Ash’arite theology, God does everything Himself and acts not by using natural things as active instruments but only as accidental occasions. Thus the technical term “occasionalism”.
In Catholic theology, grace is, on the one hand, absolutely sovereign and also, on the other hand, it uses, perfects, and respects nature. Thus divine grace comes to us through the sacraments in a way which perfects their natural matter in giving it the power to actually cause the increase of grace in souls. It is not like the mind of a writer using a pen to make words on paper but like the love in a man’s soul giving his body the power to procreate a baby in a woman’s body. The pen is only accidentally and externally connected with the writer, but the body is essentially and internally one with the soul.
What is like the human body in the sacraments is Christ’s Body, Christ’s incarnate humanity, which won grace for us by His Passion (and death and Resurrection). Christ, divine and human, acts as what St. Thomas calls a “united instrument”, as a man’s soul and body act as a “united instrument” in sexual intercourse. Thus somewhat as a man really unites to a woman in intercourse (so much so that they procreate new human life), Christ really unites to His faithful in the sacraments.
If you stood on Calvary under the Good Thief’s cross, mistakenly believing it to be Christ’s cross, and the blood of the Good Thief fell on you, you would not receive any sacramental grace, despite your faith. If you stood under Christ’s cross, you would. Sacraments are that literal, that physical. Salvation is very physical. If the woman with the hemorrhage had touched the hem of St. Peter’s garment instead of Christ’s, her faith alone would not have healed her until it was joined to His body by her touch.—Unless God had willed to heal her that way, of course. God can work outside his sacraments, and often does. There is much “back-door grace”, so to speak. But the sacraments are the front door to Heaven, to divine life.