This and That No. 20 - Charles Stuart, King and Martyr edition

Today is the Feast Day of Charles Stuart, King and Martyr. Charles the First was the second born son of James I of England (and VI of Scotland), who became heir to the throne upon the death of his elder brother Henry. He became king on March 27, 1625. During his reign the Puritans, Calvinist extremists and schismatics unsatisfied with the Elizabethan settlement, stirred up strife, dissension, and rebellion contrary to the clear commands of the Scripture they falsely professed to be their highest and final authority. This eventually broke out into the English Civil War. The Puritan Roundheads (forerunners to the Whigs and Liberals) seized control of the country militarily, and forced Parliament, from which King Charles' supporters were illegally excluded, to establish a kangaroo court and try King Charles upon the trumped up charge of treason. He was found guilty and on January 30, 1649 was beheaded. Britain then fell under the evil dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell's death, Charles' son who had been forced into exile was restored to the throne, and the restored Church of England canonized the martyred king, as a saint.

And yearly now, before the Martyrs’ King,
For thee she offers her maternal tears,
Calls us, like thee, to His dear feet to cling,
And bury in His wounds our earthly fears.

And Angels hear, and there is mirth in Heaven,
Fit prelude of the joy, when spirits won
Like thee to patient Faith, shall rise forgiven,
And at thy Saviour’s knees thy bright example own. - John Keble, "King Charles the Martyr", from The Christian Year

Upcoming Essays

I have one essay left in the series of "Arts and Culture" themed essays which I began last fall. That essay, on the topic of multiculturalism, should be finished and posted at some point later this week.

I am still mulling over what I want to write about this year. There are a few "conservative classics" that I would like to write reviews about, if for no other reason than as an excuse to read them again. I have one or two topical essays in mind that I will be tackling as soon as I have finished the multiculturalism essay, including one on egalitarianism and one on feminism. I have a series of three essays on the subject of criticism (literary and cultural) planned for later in the year.

Unlike last year, I will not be dividing my essays into three major topical areas and deliberately devoting a portion of the year to each. Nevertheless, I expect that religious and theological essays will largely fall in the Ash Wednesday to Trinity Sunday period anyway, for the simple reason that my reading will be primarily theological and devotional writings during that period.

The Apostle of High Culture

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous senator, orator, and philosopher of the Roman Republic, in its last days before the rise of the dynasty of the Caesars, in his Tusculan Disputations, compared the education of the mind to the cultivation of the field. In response to the objection that bad lives on the part of philosophers discredit their philosophy, Cicero wrote:

[I]t is not every mind which has been properly cultivated that produces fruit; and, to go on with the comparison, as a field, although it may be naturally fruitful, cannot produce a crop without dressing, so neither can the mind without education; such is the weakness of either without the other. Whereas philosophy is the culture of the mind: this it is which plucks up vices by the roots; prepares the mind for the receiving of seeds; commits them to it, or, as I may say, sows them, in the hope that, when come to maturity, they may produce a plentiful harvest. (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Book II: “On Bearing Pain”, translation by C. D. Yonge)

There is an interesting parallel between this passage and the parable Jesus told of the sower and the seed. In Jesus’ parable, a man sowed good seed in different types of soil with results which varied in accordance with the soil. The seed, Jesus explained, was the Word of God, and the soil was the hearts and minds of men. In Cicero’s illustration, philosophy is to the mind, what cultivation is to a field. Both illustrations make the point that the quality of the soil affects the quality of the harvest, i.e., that the quality of the heart or mind, determines how fruitful the seed of the Word in the one case, or the cultivation of philosophy in the other, will be. Without making this point, Cicero’s illustration could not have served the purpose for which he gave it. Cicero also, however, stresses the flip-side, that no matter how good the soil – the mind - , it will not produce a good crop without the cultivation of education and philosophy.

In addition to the points Cicero intentionally made, this passage also illustrates the origins of the concept of “culture”. “Culture” is, of course, etymologically derived from the same Latin root as the verb “cultivate”. The word “agriculture” is created by the addition of this word, meaning “to till” or “to plough” and by extension “to prepare” to the Latin word for field. We have come to apply the word culture to a wide variety of activities which make up our way of life. This use of the word culture would appear to have begun as a metaphorical application of the idea of “cultivating” the human mind, heart, soul, or spirit similar to Cicero’s.

There are variations to how we use the word “culture” in reference to human beings. Anthropologists and sociologists use it to refer to religious beliefs and practices, languages, folklore, customs and habits, and everything about a particular people’s manner of living which gives that people a distinct identity. We can see the root meaning of culture in this when we think about how these things, which are passed on from one generation to the next, cultivate or prepare people for life within a particular society.

There is another way in which we use the word culture in which the idea of cultivating our mind and character is even more apparent. We sometimes speak of a person with sophisticated and refined tastes as “having culture” or, when someone goes to a Shakespearean play, symphony, art gallery or opera, say that they are “getting culture”. When we use these expressions we are referring to what is called “high culture”. The idea of high culture, is that of a society’s greatest cultural achievements which mark that society as being truly civilized. It is supposed to have a civilizing effect upon the minds, character, and manners of those it influences, much like that which Cicero claimed for philosophy.

The concept of high culture came under heavy attack in the 20th Century. Relativist critics have challenged its claims to superiority over popular or mass culture, and weight has been given to their challenge by the growing popularity of democratic and egalitarian ideals. The fraudulent nature of much that was passed off as high art, music and literature in the avant garde era of the early 20th Century and even more so in the post-modern era of the late 20th Century, has not helped the case for high culture.

That case was brilliantly made, however, in the 19th Century, by poet and critic Matthew Arnold. In the 1860’s he wrote a series of essays which were published serially, then compiled into a volume entitled Culture and Anarchy, to which he added a lengthy preface. In this preface Arnold stated that the purpose of the essay was to “recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties” after which he gave a now famous definition of culture:

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

By “total perfection”, Arnold does not appear to have meant absolute flawlessness so much as well-roundedness, balance, and harmonious integration. To demonstrate the nature of the perfection he believed culture strives after, he borrowed the phrase “sweetness and light” from an allegory by Dean Swift. In that allegory, a spider was arguing with a honeybee about which of the two of them produced superior work. This took place within the context of a satire about the 18th Century argument between French intellectuals over whether the writings of classical authors or modern authors were superior. In Swift’s satire, “The Battle of the Books”, the books themselves come to life and go to war with each other, and it is a volume of Aesop’s fables which finds the spider and the bee and settles their argument in the bee’s favour by saying that the bee fills his hive with “honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”

If the contributions of the ancients appeared to be the “sweetness and light” of the honeybee in comparison with the web of venom and dirt spun by the spider of modern thought to Jonathan Swift in the 18th Century, the comparison must have seen that much more apt to Matthew Arnold in the 19th Century. Arnold lived and wrote in the Victorian era when the industrialism of Manchester was reshaping Britain after its own image before his very eyes. He saw the new industrialism as having begotten a “faith in machinery”, which exaggerated the importance of machinery and treated it “as if it had a value in and for itself” and he regarded this misplaced faith as “our besetting danger”. He recognized that the “movement towards wealth and industrialism” which spawned this faith was necessary “in order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society of the future” but warned that the material well-being of future generations was being purchased at the price of the spiritual well-being of the present generation. In these warnings, Arnold anticipated Jacques Ellul’s critique of “the technological society” by almost a century.

Arnold introduced his essay by referring to remarks by “that fine speaker and famous Liberal” John Bright, who had dismissed culture as “a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin”. At the end of his introduction, he said that “like Mr. Bright” and others, he was a liberal but one “tempered by experience, reflection and renouncement” and “above all , a believer in culture”. Culture and Anarchism is a criticism of liberalism – 19th Century classical Victorian liberalism – from within, which it is important to keep in mind if we want to understand how the various threads of the critique tie together. It is the agenda of 19th Century liberalism – ecclesiastical disestablishmentarianism, individualism or “doing as one likes”, and industrialism, which are criticized as the source of “our present difficulties”, but from someone who accepts liberalism’s basic principles.

Thus, when the move to disestablish the Irish church “not by the power of reason and justice, but by the power of the antipathy of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to establishments” is discussed, Arnold’s criticism is in many ways the mirror image of that of his godfather, John Keble almost forty years previously. Keble, an Anglican vicar, had responded to a move by Parliament to eliminate several dioceses in Ireland, with a fiery sermon against “the National Apostasy”. This sermon was credited as the beginning of the Oxford Movement by John Henry Newman, who led that movement until he left the Church of England to join the Church of Rome. The Oxford Movement was a spiritual revival within the High Church branch of the Church of England, which in response to the growth of philosophical, religious and political liberalism, sought to refocus the Church on her spiritual establishment, as a branch of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, Church” by Christ and His Apostles. One of the fiercest opponents of the Oxford movement had been Arnold’s father, the latitudinarian and liberal headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold shared his father’s Broad Church position and his rejection of the miraculous and supernatural, and so when he criticized the Puritans, Nonconformists, and the disestablishment movement within the Church of England it was for different reasons than Keble and Newman. These groups, he argued, tend to promote provincialism, whereas ecclesiastical establishments tend to produce the kind of total view of things which he called culture.

This provincial attitude, like Puritan and Nonconformist faith and industrial capitalism, tended to be associated with the middle classes, and Arnold dubbed these “Philistines”. This term, taken from the name of the enemies of the Israelites in the Old Testament, was already being used in Europe to refer to people who had no appreciation for culture. The Philistine, Arnold wrote, is “the enemy of the children of light” and this label which “gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children” is particularly appropriate to the middle class because they “not only do not pursue sweetness and light” but “prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea meetings, and addresses…which makes up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched”.

If we think about the kind of person who judges the status of others solely or primarily upon their level of income, who only understands the value of education in the utilitarian sense of it being a means towards getting a good, well-paying job, and who dismisses books, art, and all other cultural products which do not provide cheap amusement or contribute towards career advancement as useless, you will have a pretty good picture of what Arnold meant. It is not a flattering picture of the middle class, but Arnold was no easier on any other class. The aristocracy he dubbed “Barbarians”, after the people who overthrew Roman civilization and argued that their culture was merely external and did not touch the heart. The industrial labour class he called “the Populace”, and while this is the least blatantly insulting of these labels, the anarchy referred to in the title of the volume consists largely of this class “marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes”.

By treating these classes in this way, Arnold made the point that culture is not the property of any one class while simultaneously arguing that active hostility to culture is characteristic of one particular class – the Philistine middle class.

In his preface, which, remember, was written after the body of the text had already been written and published serially, Arnold remarks that the “strongest and most vital part of the English Philistinism was the Puritan and Hebraising middle-class” and says that “its Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality”. Hebraism, in the fourth of the essays in Culture and Anarchy is contrasted with Hellenism as one of two great forces shaping human history, both with the “final aim” of “man’s perfection or salvation”. They differ in that “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience”. This essay is one which no orthodox Christian could possibly agree with because he associates the idea of “seeing things as they really are” with the rejection of the supernatural and because Christianity itself is obviously a Hebraising force. Arnold acknowledged that Christianity is a form of Hebraism but distinguished it from Puritan Hebraism. Early Christianity, he said, was a Hebraism which replaced the Hellenism of Greco-Roman culture, but it did so at a time when Hellenism was naturally waning and Hebraism naturally waxing in the mainstream of Western history. Conversely, Puritanism was a Hebraism which checked the “central current of the world’s progress” when the Hellenism of the “Renescence” (1) was that mainstream.

While this reads like a case of special pleading that allows Arnold to condemn Hebraism in Puritanism while praising it in early Christianity the distinction is actually important to his argument, because it is precisely this matter of being “not in contact with the main current of national life” which he identifies as the source of provincialism among the Nonconformists.

Arnold’s association of “the main current of national life”, i.e., what we would call “the mainstream” today with the balanced, harmonious, and “total” or “whole” worldview which he argues that culture imparts, is both a strength and a weakness of his book. Sectarianism and separatism have long gone hand in glove with a tendency to exaggerate the importance of minor and peripheral matters to the point where major and central matters are eclipsed or even lost. Thus Arnold’s linking of Nonconformity, Dissent and disestablishmentarianism to provincialism and Philistinism has much merit. What if, however, the mainstream is itself diverted into the wrong channel? Arnold’s basic acceptance of the liberal concept of progress appears to have been a hindrance to his giving this question the serious thought which it deserves.

That this was a weakness in his argument is all to clear today when we realize just how appalled Arnold would be if he could return to the 21st Century and see where the mainstream has led us since his day. The Greek and Latin classics, which he and Dean Swift associated with “sweetness and light”, have lost the central place they once held in the curriculum to be replaced with subjects considered to be more appropriate for a world where industry and machinery dominate. Philistines are now mass-producing “culture” which resembles the “dirt and poison” of the spider more than it does the “sweetness and light” of the honeybee and have made it difficult for people to escape their web, even in the privacy of their own homes.

Throughout his book, Arnold struggled with the undesirable consequences of the liberalism he had inherited from his father. Liberalism in all of its manifestations, was an attempt to cling on to everything good which had been passed down from the classical and Christian eras while embracing the philosophy of the “Enlightenment” which was killing those good things off at the root. Religious liberalism sought to cling on to Christian ethics while rejecting the basic message of Christianity that the all-powerful, miracle-performing, Creator God, came down and dwelt among us as a man, and redeemed us to Himself through the shedding of His own blood, then rose from the grave to offer us new and everlasting life. Political liberalism sought to find a rational defense for the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen which arose out of a constitution and common law that had evolved over centuries in a kingdom influenced by Roman law and Christianity which would maintain those rights and liberties once everything that had given birth to them had been lost. The very idea of “progress” is an attempt to keep the Christian hope of the Kingdom of God alive, for people who no longer believe in God, and who reject the authority of God the king.

Each of these attempts proved to be a colossal failure in the 20th Century. Religious liberals found that Christian ethics could no longer be maintained without Christian doctrine and so found themselves preaching a watered down, subtance free morality, to dwindling congregations. Political liberals threw away the prescriptive rights and liberties of Englishmen in favour of the soft tyranny of the nanny state. The doctrine of progress has led to the kingdom of hell rather than the kingdom of heaven on earth.

None of this, of course, was evident in the 19th Century. Matthew Arnold deserves much credit for seeing as many problems as he did. His concept of a wholistic, integrated culture in which beauty and truth, sweetness and light, are given their proper due, remains an admirable ideal, albeit one the high culture of the 20th Century has fallen rather short of. This is not Matthew Arnold's fault, however, and the fact that the difference remains noticeable to anyone should be attributed to his abiding influence on cultural critics up to this day.

(1) i.e., the Renaissance. This term was new at the time, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy having just been published 9 years earlier, the English translation not yet having appeared. Arnold correctly predicted that the term was “destined to become of more common use amongst us as the movement which it denotes comes, as it will come, increasingly to interest us”. His Anglicized spelling of the word did not, however, catch on.

This and That No. 18

It has been a few months since my last “This and That”. For those unfamiliar with these I will begin with a note of explanation. Most of my posts on this blog are extended essays on particular topics (theological, political, philosophical, ethical, aesthetical, and cultural). The posts entitled “This and That”, on the other hand, combine shorter discussions of multiple topics with personal announcements, notifications of upcoming essays and sometimes commentary on current events.

A New Liturgical Year

We are a week and a half into the new Christian liturgical year, last Sunday having been the second Sunday in Advent. Over the summer I found a copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year in a used book store. Keble was the Victorian Anglican priest after whom Keble College in Oxford is named. His name, like that of Edward Pusey, will forever be linked with that of John Henry Newman as one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, the early 19th Century Catholic revival in the Church of England. Newman credited Keble’s 1833 sermon on “National Apostasy” with launching the movement. The Christian Year was written before all that, however. It was his first publication, written while he was a young man, consisting of a series of devotional poems, one for morning and evening, ones for every Sunday in the liturgical year, and ones for other important liturgical dates.

I have decided to read it the way it was intended to be read, each poem on the day of the Christian calendar it is assigned to. I will also be listening to a collection of recordings of the surviving sacred cantatas by J. S. Bach according to their liturgical dates. The German, Lutheran, Baroque master composer wrote three full cycles of sacred cantatas. They have not all survived, so not every day in the Christian calendar is covered – last Sunday, Advent 2, was not, nor is next Sunday, Advent 3 – but there are over 200 of them still available. The version I will be listening to is the complete edition recorded by the Bachakademie in Stuttgart under the direction of Helmuth Rilling, released in 2011 by hänssler CLASSIC.

A New Concert Season

Speaking of classical music, it is not just a new liturgical year that has started, but the new concert season as well. It started back in September, of course. So far the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra has given us excellent performances of pieces by Rachmaninoff, Dvorák, Shostakovich, Beethoven, Mathieu, and Sibelius, as well as a “Night of Song and Dance” about which it is probably best, in keeping with the spirit of Christian charity, to say very little. The next performance, on December 17th, will be of Handel’s Messiah, which is always something I look forward to in the Christmas season.

Manitoba Opera put on its fall production last month. This year they chose Richard Strauss’ Salome as their opener, a one act opera based upon Oscar Wilde’s play, itself based upon the Biblical story of Herodias’ daughter who asked for and received John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter. It was a great performance and I am looking forward to their concert of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and their production of Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment, next year.

C. S. Lewis and the Penitential Language of the Prayer Book

Dr. Larry Dixon, who was my faculty advisor at Providence College (now Providence University College) back in the 90’s, has recently discovered C. S. Lewis’ “Miserable Offenders” An Interpretation of Prayer Book Language. He will be reproducing and discussing it at his blog (http://larrydixon.wordpress.com) in a series of posts. I recommend that you check it out. By an odd coincidence I read this same essay earlier this year myself. It was included in God in the Dock, which I reviewed here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/05/christianity-in-age-of-unbelief.html The title of the essay comes from the General Confession in the order for Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer which reads:

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

Lewis’ essay is a defence of the repentant attitude reflected in these words, which had come under attack in his day by liberals offended at the thought that we are “miserable offenders” who must approach God in a spirit of penitence.

Interesting Discussions Elsewhere on the Web

Lawrence Auster, a traditionalist American writer has written a number of critiques of Darwinism recently, which can be found at his website A View From the Right: http://amnation.com/vfr/ Dr. Steve Burton, one of the contributors to What’s Wrong With the World, responded here: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/11/the_barrenness_of_antidarwinis.html, which, as you can see, led to an interesting debate in the comments. This also appears to be the background to a series of premises Dr. Burton has been posting about evolutionary psychology. I contributed to the discussion in the comments to the first premise here: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/12/first_premise.html

The Ongoing Fight For Freedom

Advent, like Lent, is a period devoted to penitent reflection, prior to the celebration of God’s grace given to man in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There are those, however, who show very little penitence and humility in this season, or in any other. The anti-racists, for example, smugly confident in their own righteousness, continue their campaign to have the government punish and silence those who disagree with them. Thankfully, their actions are not going unopposed.

Next week, Marc Lemire of the Freedomsite will appear before the Federal Court of Canada, which will be hearing the appeal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission against the September 2009 decision of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal which ruled that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was unconstitutional. If the Federal Court upholds the original decision, Section 13 will finally be stricken from the law. Section 13 is the law which declares that it is an act of illegal discrimination to electronically communicate any material which is “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of their membership in a group you are forbidden to discriminate against. You can read Mr. Lemire’s account of his upcoming court case here: http://blog.freedomsite.org/2011/12/fate-of-section-13-to-be-decided-in.html Let us pray that he will be successful and that we will finally be rid of this disgusting piece of thought-control legislation once and for all.

Meanwhile, today Connie Fournier was cross-examined by Richard Warman and his lawyer, with regards to one of his many nuisance lawsuits against Free Dominion, the conservative message board that she and her husband Mark administer. Let us also remember Mark and Connie in our prayers, that they might win their legal battles, and finally be free of these obnoxious SLAPP suits.

Let us also pray that Richard Warman and the other anti-racists will be humbled, repent, and make restitution to those they have harmed in their misguided zeal.

Upcoming Essays

I have not yet completed my 2011 “arts and culture” series of essays, and I will not have the time to complete it before the end of the year so some of the essays will be post next year. The final essays in the series will be an essay on the beauty of nature, a review of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, an essay on multiculturalism, and an essay about Matthew Arnold and his Culture and Anarchy. I had also planned about three essays on the subject of criticism but these will now be part of a new series for next year, as the research materials for one of them will take me some time to gather together. The final essays of the “Arts and Culture” series will not necessarily be posted in the order in which I have mentioned them above.

Advent and Christmas Reading

It was a few years ago that I read John Lukacs’ first autohistory Confessions of an Original Sinner. In the library yesterday I found a copy of his second autohistory Last Rites, which is a couple of years old now. I started it last night. I will also be reading a collection of the sermons of St. Augustine for Advent through Epiphany, George Grant’s Time as History (based upon his 1969 Massey Lectures on Nietzsche), Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism, and I plan on re-reading C. S. Lewis’ fiction, his Narnia series, and his space trilogy.

The Mysterious Case of the Bread, Wine, and Water

The ancient Greeks loved their mysteries. In that, they were like us, although their mysteries were quite a bit different from ours. A mystery, to the ancient Greeks, was not a story in which a crime was committed and a brilliant but eccentric investigator was called in to find the culprit and solve the puzzle that had left the Athenian or Spartan authorities baffled. The Hercules of the Greek mysteries was not exactly known for using his “little grey cells”.

The ancient Greek mysteries were religious rites or ceremonies associated with the cults of particular deities. The ancient Greeks were polytheistic. They recognized many gods and while the stories told about those gods, the Greek myths, were shared by the Hellenic peoples, religious worship varied greatly throughout Greece. The city was the sovereign political unit in ancient Greece and each city had its own established cult honoring the patron gods of the city. Each citizen was expected to participate in the rites of his own city but was also free to worship other gods as well. Several of the Greek gods and goddesses had mystery cults in their honour. The most famous of these were the Eleusian Mysteries and the Dionysian Mysteries.. The Eleusian Mysteries were based in Eleusis and were in honour of Demeter the goddess of harvest and grain and her daughter Persephone. The Dionysian Mysteries, in honour of Dionysius or Bacchus, the god of wine, were not tied to a particular location, and indeed spread throughout all Greece and eventually to Rome. Both of these mystery cults clearly had their origins as fertility religions.

Mystery cults were not open to everybody but rather only to those who were initiated. The first mystery of one of these cults was it’s initiation rite. As part of the ceremony each initiate would swear an oath that they would not reveal the secrets of the cult to outsiders. This is why they were called “mysteries”. The Greek term “to mysterion” originally meant a secret. Some of the mysteries were multi-layered, with initiates learning more of the cult’s secrets as they progressed. Due to the secretive nature of the mysteries we do not know all of the details about them. We do know that many of the mystery rites involved a re-enactment of the main myth pertaining to the gods the cult worshipped. In the Eleusian Mysteries, for example, this was the rape of Persephone, in which she was abducted by Hades, taken to the underworld, and searched for by her mother until an arrangement was made that she would spend part of the year in the underworld as Hades’ queen (winter) and the rest of the year with her mother (spring through harvest).

While the ancient Greek mysteries are long gone, they have inspired the rituals of many other groups down through the years. One obvious example to point to is freemasonry. Freemasonry too is a group whose initiates are sworn not to reveal its secrets. When the Dionysian Mysteries came to Ancient Rome, according to Livy, (1) subversive elements abused the secrecy of the Mysteries to plot sedition against the Republic. Similar accusations have been made against the freemasons. Freemasonry is also like the Dionysian Mysteries in that more often than not it is just an excuse to have fun, get drunk and throw a party.

Christianity too has been influenced by these practices. Christianity borrowed many things from the Greeks, and mystery rites were one of them. We will see what the Christian mysteries are momentarily, and how they are both similar to and different from Greek mysteries. First, it needs to be pointed out that the fact that Christianity incorporated the concept of a “mystery” from pagan Greek religion, does not mean, as some skeptics have argued, that Christianity is not the divinely revealed, true faith. Just because pagan fertility religions feature a dying and reviving god, does not mean that Christianity, centred around the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event in human history attested by eyewitnesses that took place in the capital of a province of the Roman Empire, under the nose of the Roman authorities, is not true. Rather, as C. S. Lewis has argued, it means that in Christianity, the myth has come true. (2)

It should also be pointed out that just because the Church borrowed something from the Greeks does not mean that by doing so the Christian faith was polluted and corrupted. There are many Christians who do not like that Christianity borrowed so much from the Greeks. Some would argue that Greek thought has been a corrupting influence in the Church. These would use the expression “the Hellenization of Christianity” to describe the process whereby Christianity was supposedly led astray from the purity of its Hebrew roots.

It is impossible, however, to conceive of what this supposed, pristine, pre-Hellenized Christianity would have looked up. The earliest Christian writings, including those of the Apostles and close associates of the Apostles like St. Luke that are considered canonical Scripture by the Church, already incorporate elements of Greek thought. St. John the Evangelist begins his Gospel by identifying Jesus with both the logos of Greek philosophy and the God of the Old Testament, bringing Greek and Hebrew thought together. Jesus Himself quotes a Greek proverb in the New Testament in His post-Ascension appearance to Saul of Tarsus leading to the latter’s conversion.(3)

The Christian mysteries have a clear Scriptural warrant as well. Greek was the universal language when Christianity was born. It became the language of the Church and remained the language of the Church for centuries. During these centuries the Church referred to its own rites and ceremonies as “mysteries”. Eventually, Latin, the language of Rome, became more common in Western Europe and in the Western Church. When the Western, Latin-speaking Church split from the Eastern, Greek-speaking Church in the 11th Century, the Eastern Churches continued to call their rites mysteries and they do so to this day. The Western Church, however, had begun as far back as Tertullian, to use the Latin word “sacramentum” to translate the Greek “mysterion”. Hence, the sacred mysteries of Christianity, are in the Western Church known as “sacraments”.

The Eastern Church does not take a position on how many Christian mysteries there are. It recognizes at least seven, the seven that the Roman Catholic Church considers to be sacraments. Martin Luther and John Calvin, however, argued that there were only two sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist. These are the two rites which the early Church first called mysteries, the two which most obviously resemble Greek mystery rites, the two which are clearly instituted by Christ Himself for His Church in the New Testament, and the two which are recognized by all branches of the Christian Church, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. These are the two that are the subject of this essay.

Baptism and Holy Communion are not called “mysteries” anywhere in the New Testament. Baptism, however, is clearly an initiation rite, and Holy Communion is a sort of visual re-enactment of the central event in the Christian narrative – the death of Jesus Christ for our sins, and the shedding of His blood. They are therefore the functional equivalent of Greek mysteries with an important difference. There is no “secret knowledge” that the baptized are sworn to keep hidden from those outside the Church.

In this, the orthodox Christian Church is to be distinguished from the heretics, called anti-Christs by St. John the Apostle, who challenged Apostolic doctrine and authority in the early centuries of the Church. These have come to be known as “Gnostics” because they claimed to have “secret knowledge” or “gnosis” which they revealed only to their initiates.

In contrast with the pagan Greek and Gnostic practices, the Christian Church from the time of the Apostles has publicly declared the doctrines of the faith into which its initiates are baptized. The Apostles’ Creed, is believed by Church historians to have originally been prepared in Rome, for use in baptism. In Rome, the church developed the practice of baptizing its converts on Easter Sunday, and as part of the ceremony they would publicly confess their faith. The Apostle’s Creed is believed to have been the formula for those confessions. The Nicene Creed is regularly recited in Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and liturgical Protestant (Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, some Reformed) Churches as part of the liturgy of Holy Communion. This practice dates back to the century in which the Nicene Creed was composed, and the Church leaders at the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople may very well have intended for the Creed to be used that way. The contents of neither Creed were ever restricted to Christian believers, but contain, rather, the basic Christian message that the Church proclaims to the world.

This is in keeping with how the word “mystery” is used in the New Testament. “To mysterion” is found about 30 times in the New Testament. Jesus Christ Himself is only quoted as using it once, the quotation being found in all three Synoptic Gospels. This is when Jesus, having spoken to the crowd in parables, explains why He did so to His disciples:

Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. (Matt. 13:11)

The mysteries of the kingdom of heaven were not secrets the disciples were to keep hidden forever, however. If they were, the Evangelists would not have written the explanations of the parables down in the Gospels. Following the Resurrection, Jesus commissioned the Apostles to go into all the world, preaching the Gospel to all people, baptizing them and teaching them all which Jesus had taught them. The mysteries of the kingdom were to be secrets no more. St. Paul frequently describes the Gospel as a mystery, hidden in past times, but now revealed.

What happened between Matthew 13 and Matthew 28 that brought about this change?

The events of Holy Week of course. On the first Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, identifying Himself publicly with an Old Testament prophecy about the coming Messiah. At His trial before the High Priests, He identified Himself with the Messianic “Son of Man” from the Book of Daniel. When He rose again from the dead, on the first Easter Sunday, He was “declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness” (Rom. 1:4).

The kingdom was no longer to be wrapped up in mysteries, hidden from the multitude and kept secret among the disciples, because the King had revealed Himself, and the Good News was to be preached to every creature. In Christianity, the meaning of the mystery was to be inverted. Christian knowledge is not to be concealed, hidden, and reserved for the initiates but to be proclaimed to the world. As St. Paul put it:

And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. (1 Tim 3:16)

If Christianity is a religion of revelation, then, and not a religion of secret knowledge, what is the purpose of the Christian mysteries, the sacraments?

Let us look at what the New Testament has to say about them.

Baptism

Baptism was an Old Testament ritual of purification for uncleanness that became associated with the ministry of John the Baptist. John the Baptist, born six months before Jesus, was the son of Elizabeth, a cousin of the Virgin Mary. An eccentric, Old Testament style prophet, John earned his nickname by preaching in the wilderness around the Jordan River in Judaea. His message was simple “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. Those who heeded his word, confessed their sins and were baptized by John in the Jordan. Baptism, then, in the ministry of John the Baptist, was an outward sign of repentance.

Then Jesus came to John to be baptized. This shocked him. John knew Jesus to be the One he spoke of when he told the Pharisees “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.” When John was preaching “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, what he meant was “Repent, because Jesus, the King God has promised you, is here”. So why was Jesus Himself coming to be baptized?

This is exactly what John the Baptist asked Jesus, and Jesus’ answer was “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” John may not have fully understood this, but we can understand it now, as the first century readers of the Gospels would have been able to understand it, because of the writings of St. Paul.

In the sixth chapter of his epistle to the church in Rome, St. Paul writes:

Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. (Rom 6:3-4)

The believer in Jesus Christ is joined to Christ in a spiritual union. Christ is in the believer and the believer is in Christ. In Christian baptism, the initiatory rite of the Christian faith, the believer is identified with Christ in His death and resurrection.

This is one side of an important spiritual truth. The other side is that Christ in His death and resurrection, chose to identify Himself with sinful mankind, and take man’s sins upon Himself.. This is how salvation was accomplished. “He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him”. (2 Cor. 5:21)

It was in His death that He took our sins upon Himself. This was not the beginning of His self-identification with fallen man however. In one sense it began with His incarnation. He chose to identify Himself with us by taking humanity upon Himself. Symbolically, however, the beginning of His identification with sinful mankind was His baptism. Baptism was a ritual purification. One was ritually purified with water when one had become unclean in certain ways. John in particular was baptizing as a symbol of repentance. Jesus had no need of such purification for Himself, for He had no sins to repent of, but He underwent the baptism in order to identify Himself with sinners, who do need to repent. The very reason He became a man was to take man’s sins upon Himself and so save those who would put their trust in Him. This was why the Father sent Him (John 6:38-40) and when Jesus humbled Himself by identifying Himself with sinful man in baptism, God the Father acknowledge Him as His Son from Heaven.

In Jesus’ baptism He identified with sinful, fallen, humanity, and in our baptism we identify with Him in His death and resurrection. Christian baptism then, is all about the spiritual union between the believer and Christ, in which that which is the believer’s, i.e. his sins, become Christ’s, and that which is Christ’s, His death and resurrection, become the believer’s. It is quite appropriate, therefore, as an initiation rite into the Christian faith, and was instituted as such for the Church by Christ:

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (Matt. 28:18-20).

Holy Communion

Christ’s words commissioning the Eucharist were recorded in Scripture before any of the Gospels were written. The Gospels were written after the epistles, and St. Paul in the eleventh chapter of his first epistle to the Church in Corinth describes how Jesus established the Eucharist. Saints Matthew, Mark and Luke would later place the words of institution within their context in the narrative of Jesus life.

Christ instituted Holy Communion at the Last Supper, i.e., the last Passover seder that he shared with His Apostles on the night in which He was betrayed by Judas and handed over to the High Priests. At that supper, Jesus took bread, i.e. matzah, a flat unleavened bread similar to a cracker, gave thanks, and then broke it saying:

Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

He also took the cup, i.e., of wine, and said:

This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.

St. Paul, after recording this, goes on to tell the Corinthian Church:

For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. (1 Cor. 11:26)

If baptism is the Christian initiation mystery, Holy Communion is the mystery in which Christ’s death, the central event in Christianity’s redemption history, is reenacted.

St. John does not record the institution of the Eucharist in his account of the Last Supper. Earlier in his Gospel, however, he tells of how the people who had witnessed Him feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, later came up to Him in Capernaum. They wanted to know how He had gotten there (He had walked across the sea to rejoin His disciples in their boat) and Jesus told them they were looking for Him for the wrong reasons, that they should labour “for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life” instead of “the meat which perisheth”. They then asked Him what work they needed to do to “work the works of God” and were told that “This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent”.

They still had the feeding of the five thousand on their minds and asked Him for a miracle that they might believe, dropping a hint as to what kind of miracle they would like by referring to the manna their ancestors ate while wandering in the desert of Sinai. Jesus then contrasted the manna with Himself, saying that He was the “bread of life: he that cometh to Me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst” and explained that His purpose in coming down from heaven was to save the people His Father gave Him, i.e. those who believe in Him.

This was not received well by His audience, which included people who knew His mother Mary and her husband Joseph, and grumbled at His having said that He “came down from heaven”.

Jesus response to them was not worded in a way that would be easier for them to accept. It included the following:

I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (John 6:48-51)

When this produced further strife among His audience He intensified it by saying:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. (John 6:53-58)

Jesus’ disciples’ called this a “hard saying” and there has been tremendous controversy over it within the Church. When these words are read in their full context there is no conflict with the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith. Jesus clearly equates “eating His flesh” and “drinking His blood” with believing in Him. Jesus is the Savior, Who saved His people through His sacrificial death, in which His body was nailed to a cross and pierced with a spear and His blood was shed. The sinner who trusts Jesus as Savior appropriates that salvation through faith.

There is also a reference to the mystery of Holy Communion in these words. Consider again the words of institution spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper. Here is how St. Matthew records them:

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is My body. And He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. (Matt. 26:26-29)

“This is My body”, “This is My blood”. That Jesus did not have this in mind when He said “He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him” is extremely improbable.

Some evangelical Protestants insist upon that improbability however, and maintain that there is no reference to the Eucharist in John 6. Such evangelicals insist that the believer does not in any way eat Christ’s flesh or drink His blood in Holy Communion, that the reference to doing so in John 6 does not refer in any way to the sacrament. This is the doctrine taught by the Reformer Ulrich Zwingle. It was not the doctrine of the first evangelical Reformers Martin Luther or John Calvin, nor was it the doctrine of John and Charles Wesley who led the great evangelical revival in the English Church in the 18th Century. The early Reformers and the Wesleys believed, like the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

What Luther and Calvin disagreed with was the doctrine of transubstantiation. To understand that doctrine you need to understand the distinction, going back to Aristotle, between substance and accidents. Imagine a blue box. It is a container in which you can place things to store or transport them. If it were not that it would not be a box. That is the substance of the box, it’s essence, that which cannot be changed without changing it into something other than a box. If you were to paint the box red, however, it would still be a box even though it would no longer be blue. Blue and red, are accidents of the box. They are properties which can be changed without changing its essential nature.

In the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, when Christ’s words of institution are spoken by a priest over the elements, consecrating the bread and wine, the substance of the bread and wine is replaced with the body and blood of Jesus Christ, while the accidents of the bread and wine, remain. In this theology, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, is contained within the physical elements, which remain Christ’s body and blood after consecration.

Dr. Luther objected that no such doctrine is taught in Scripture. The body and blood of the Lord, he argued, is present in Eucharist, because Christ is present in the Word of God which is pronounced over the bread and wine during the consecration. The bread and wine remain real bread and wine and not just “the appearance” of bread and wine. The faithful, in the sacrament, receive both the bread and wine through the physical act of eating the elements, and the real body and blood of the Lord contained in the spoken Word, through faith. (4)

This, according to Dr. Luther and St. Augustine (5), is what makes a sacrament a sacrament – the uniting of the Word with something material, in the case of baptism, water, in the case of Holy Communion, the bread and wine. Dr. Luther’s understanding, is arguably more in sync with what the Church taught from the patristic period down through the Middle Ages, than transubstantiation. The sacraments are traditionally linked with the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. In the Incarnation, the Son of God, remained God. He did not cease to be “of one substance with the Father” but He added to His person, the nature of true humanity as well. The humanity that the Son took upon Himself, was not merely the outward appearance of being a man. The idea that He was not fully human, but only appeared to be human, is the doctrine of Docetism, against which Ignatius, Irenaeus and Tertullian contended in the 2nd Century AD, and which was formally condemned by the Church as heresy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. At that Council the Church took a clear Christological stand that Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time, uniting in His One Person, the two natures of God and man in hypostatic union.

In the Incarnation, the invisible God became visible, by becoming a man. When Christ ascended back to Heaven, He left His Church on earth. St. Paul in his epistles calls the Church the “body of Christ”. The Church then, can be regarded as the earthly continuation of the Incarnation. The Holy Ghost came upon the disciples as they were gathered in the Upper Room on Pentecost. The Holy Ghost indwells individual believers and the corporate Church, in which human beings on earth are joined in spiritual union with Christ Who is seated in Heaven.

The Church has traditionally understood the mystery rites which Christ instituted as being intrinsically connected to the Church’s role as a continuation of the Incarnation on earth. This brings us back to the point made earlier, about how in Christianity, a mystery is something to be revealed, not a secret to be concealed as in paganism and Gnosticism. The Incarnation was an act of revelation – “God was manifest in the flesh” – in which that which was invisible, is made visible. In the Church, Christ Who is presently invisible, being seated at the right hand of the Father until His coming again to judge the world, is visibly present on earth. In the Christian mysteries, the invisible realities of the believer’s spiritual union with Christ in His Church, are made visible by being manifested in visible rites.

Believers in Jesus, are cleansed from their sins by His shed blood and are joined by the Holy Spirit into a union with Christ, in which they are made partakers with Him in His death and resurrection. He identified with sinners in His death on the cross, taking our sins upon Himself, so that through His death He might take away our sins. We, through faith, receive this remission of sins when we believe the Gospel, and are identified with Christ in His death and resurrection. His death becomes our death to sin, His resurrection becomes our new life in Him. When someone believed the Gospel in the Apostolic era, the first thing that happened was that they were baptized. Baptism, a purification ritual from the Old Covenant was transformed into the ritual whereby one was initiated into Christ’s Church. The physical element – the water symbolic of cleansing – was the external act united with the spiritual reality of the believer’s union with Christ, his partaking in Christ’s death and resurrection, and his being cleansed of his sins.

Christ’s sacrifice is not just the basis of our initial union with Christ however. It is the basis of our ongoing Christian lives. We become Christians through faith, believing the Gospel, and we live as Christians by faith, believing the Gospel. “The just shall live by faith”. Christ’s one-time sacrifice, as that which sustains us in the Christian life, is proclaimed in the sacrament of Communion, where Christ’s Word “this is My body” and “this is My blood” is joined to the physical elements of bread and wine.

Through these rites, the spiritual realities become visibly tangible to the believer. By joining the Word, in which the spiritual truths are conveyed, to a physical element representing the spiritual truth, the physical elements become a vessel for the Word, making it easier for the Word to be received in faith. (6)

Faith’s object, must always be Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, and His one-time sacrifice and resurrection. The Zwinglian doctrine arose out of a legitimate concern that people were putting their faith in the physical elements of the sacraments rather than in Christ. The Zwinglian response to this concern, however, went too far. The Incarnational understanding of the Christian sacraments has been emphasized in Christian doctrine and worship since the earliest days of the Church. It is that understanding of the sacraments as “a visible Word”, an extension of what happened in the Incarnation of Christ, that makes sense of the Christian mysteries.

The case has been cracked and the mystery solved.

(1) Livy’s account is found in Book 39 of his Ab Urbe Condita. In English translation, it can be found in Rome and the Mediterranean (Penguin Classics: London, 1976) pp. 401-415.

(2) See C. S. Lewis’s God In the Dock: Essays On Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper, and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1970, in particular the essay entitled “The Grand Miracle”.

(3) The proverb is “do not kick against the pricks”, which occurs in a number of Greek writers including Aeschylus and Euripides.

(4) The difference between Dr. Luther’s view on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic and Zwinglian views on the other, is not a moot issue, a case of theological hairsplitting. Transubstantiation denies what is plainly taught in Scripture – that after the consecration, the bread and wine are still really bread and wine. Note Jesus’ reference to the wine as “this fruit of the vine” in Matt. 26:29 after He had already spoken the words of consecration. Likewise, in verses 26, 27, and 28 of 1 Corinthians 11 St. Paul speaks of eating “bread” in the sacrament. The substance of the bread is still present and not exchanged with the substance of the body and blood, leaving only the accidents. The Zwinglian position, denying that in the Sacrament the body and blood are present to be received by the believer through faith is a different form of the same error, and one that historically, was the first step towards the anti-supernatural, rationalistic doctrine that re-interpreted the Virgin Birth, miracles, and Resurrection of Christ into non-literal events with symbolic meanings, that has corrupted many churches in the last century and a half. Of the two, the Roman Catholic error is to be preferred. Roman Catholicism is recognizably Christian. Liberalism is not. For those looking for a more in-depth treatment of the Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper I refer you to John Theodore Mueller, Christian Dogmatics (Concordia Publishing House: St. Louis, 1934) pp. 506-540. The treatment in this volume is more exhaustive than Robert Preuss’s summary treatment in Getting Into The Theology of Concord, but is also more concise than that found in Francis Pieper’s three-volume Christliche Dogmatik, of which Mueller’s work is an epitome. The Lutherans are not the only Protestants to hold to Luther’s explanation of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. Zwingle’s doctrine is sometimes called “Reformed” even though Calvin held to the real presence (in a slightly different way than Luther) and “Reformed” and “Calvinist” are usually treated as synonyms. The Zwinglian doctrine is most associated, historically, with the more radical wing of the Reformation (the Anabaptists) and non-conformist English Protestant denominations. These denominations comprise a large part of contemporary North American evangelicalism and fundamentalism and this tends to give the misleading impression that the Zwinglian view is the “evangelical” view. The Church of England, which traditionally allows for a broad spectrum of theological positions, took an official position that is similar to Luther’s but less concise. The 39 Articles reject transubstantiation, but affirm the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. The latter is not defined, allowing for broad interpretation. In the Catholic revival within the Church of England in the 19th Century, Edward Pusey and John Keble argued in the “Tracts for the Times” for an interpretation that was indistinguishable from Luther’s position of consubstantiation. In the evangelical revival of the previous century, John and Charles Wesley, took a similar position. Note the following:

O the depth of love divine,
The' unfathomable grace;
Who shall say how bread and wine
God into man conveys?
How the bread His Flesh imparts,
How the wine transmits His Blood;
Fills His faithful people's hearts
With all the life of God?

Let the wisest mortal show
How we the grace receive,
Feeble elements bestow
A power not theirs to give.
Who explains the wondrous way,
These the virtue did convey,
Yet still remain the same – Charles Wesley



(5) “Accedit Verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tanquam visibile verbum” – St. Augustine, In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus (Tracts on the Gospel of John), 80:3, “The word connected to the element, becomes a Sacrament, that is, a visible Word”.

(6) It is in this sense that the sacraments can be said to be “means of grace”. Grace, has its source in the love of God, was purchased for the believer by the blood of Jesus Christ, is communicated to the believer through the Word, and is received by faith. The mysteries, take the Word, and unite it to a physical element. The physical element conveys the Word, and the Word conveys grace. The physical elements do not convey grace apart from the Word, and faith placed in the physical elements rather than the Word, does not receive the grace conveyed by the Word, for he has turned the sacrament into a work, and grace is not received by works. Similarly, someone who hears the Word and receives it in faith, receives the grace it conveys even when the Word is not attached to the physical elements of the sacraments.