F. J. Sheed. Theology and Sanity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1946), pp. 254-257

Truth is the one great gift Christ gives us through His Church. Life is the other. There is the same close correspondence with human nature, both in the way life works in us when we have it and the channels through which it comes to us. What this supernatural life of sanctifying grace is we have already seen in some detail and will later see in even more detail. We need only summarize here. In order to live the life of Heaven for which man is destined, he needs new powers of knowing and loving in his soul over and above the natural powers of his intellect and will. Therefore a new life principle, a new principle of operation, must be given to his soul. Though this new life is meant primarily to enable him to live in Heaven, it is given to him while he is still upon earth, and its acquisition and preservation is man’s principal business on earth. And if it does not yet have its full flowering in the direct vision of God, its effect upon the soul is still very great. It elevates the intellect to the level of faith and the will to the levels of hope and charity. It is not a gift given once for all. It may be lost and restored. What is more vital, it may be increased. While we live there is no limit to the possibility of the growth of this life in us. It is indeed a result of the energizing of God’s life in our souls; and precisely because God’s life is infinite, there is no limit to the increase of its energizing in us, save the limit of our willingness to lay ourselves open to it. . . .

What is to be noted in all seven [sacraments] is the combination of the spiritual gift with some material thing used as the vehicle by which the gift is brought to us. We have bread and water and wine and oil and the imposition of hands and the utterance of our sin and the union of a man and woman. Here again we must notice that God is treating man according to what man is. We have already seen that because man is a social being God has made a social religion for him. We see now that because man is a union of spirit and matter, God treats him as both. The sacraments are a union of spirit and matter. Naturally: because they are God’s approach to man, and that is what man is. A religion which took no proper account of man’s body and left it inactive and unsanctified would be as monstrous as a religion which left out of account his essential relations with his fellows. Religion is the act of man—the whole man, soul and body. It is not the act of the soul only, for man is not only soul: it is his very raisond’être to be not only soul. The body is not as important as the ol, in life generally or in religion; but it is as truly part of man as the soul is, and has a real part to play both in life generally and in religion.

The supernatural does not ignore the natural or substitute something else for it. It is built upon or built into the natural. Sanctifying grace does not provide us with a new soul, it enters into the soul we already have. Nor does it give the soul new faculties but elevates the faculties that are already there, giving intellect and will new powers of operation. God as Sanctifier does not destroy or bypass the work of God as Creator. What God has created, God sanctifies. All this means that the more fully man is man, the better his nature serves for the super-natural that is to be built upon it. Whatever damages man as man damages him in his religious relation to God. His integrity as man requires a proper balance between spirit and matter; and he finds this proper balance at once appallingly difficult to keep and calamitous to lose. If the body becomes dominant, he is in danger of becoming a beast. But for spiritual men there is another danger—a spiritual pride leading to contempt for the body which can bring them pretty close to the devil. 

The sacramental principle, continually reminding man of his body, will keep his feet firmly upon the ground and destroy pride in its strongest root, sanctifying his body will make it the fit partner of soul indwelt by God.

The giving of supernatural life by way of sacrament, then, corresponds with the structure of man. Observe too how precisely this particular system of sacraments corresponds with the shape of man’s natural life. Ordinarily we can count upon four determining points in human life: a man is born and a man dies: in between he grows up and he marries—or if he be a Catholic he may choose the direct ministry of God. For these four points with their five possibilities there are five sacraments. A man is reborn by Baptism by which he gets a place in the Kingdom; for his growing out of childhood there is confirmation by which he gets a function in the Kingdom; for marriage there is Matrimony, for ministry there is Holy Orders, this latter bringing a fuller function in the Kingdom; for death there is the Last Anointing. As life flows normally from one point to the next, there are two other needs, for daily bread and for healing in sickness. In the supernatural life there is a sacrament for these two completing the seven. The Blessed Eucharist provides our daily bread, the sacrament of Penance our healing in the soul’s sickness.

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Return to Lesson 9: The Elements of a Sacrament