2.1 Sign and reality

One of the most basic concepts needed to understand the sacraments is that of sign. In the context of Christian usage, sacraments make use of different material elements such as water and bread to signify a broad range of spiritual realities. When considered in their natural sense, however, signs constitute one of the most basic elements of human experience of reality. For Augustine, the concept of a sign presupposes and builds upon our natural sensory experience of things in the world. Beginning with natural things – such as a sound or a fire – we begin to form signs when we instrumentalize these things to signify different realities. For Augustine, signs are essentially existing realities that have been repurposed to communicate another reality, different from their own reality as an actually existing thing (Cameron 1999). Understood in this way, naturally existing things do not function as signs when they are simply considered in themselves as objects perceived by the senses and understood by the mind – when one sees fire or smoke, for example, the visual impression of each causes one to think of the associated concepts ‘smoke’ and ‘fire’, respectively. Although in each of these cases a limited form of signification could be said to exist between the thing itself and the concept understood by the one perceiving it, a sign in the proper sense builds on this human experience of knowing other existing things, using our experience of one thing to signify another, effectively repurposing our experience of some particular thing and causing us to think of another reality that is not experienced by the senses. For example, although both smoke and fire can be experienced directly as things in themselves, when smoke is seen but fire is not, the experience of smoke not only points to the presence of smoke itself but the presence of fire as well, even though the latter thing is not yet experienced in a sensory way.

Augustine mentions other examples of proper natural signs, such as the tracks of an animal in the snow, or emotion expressed on another’s face. In each case, a concept not available to the senses is communicated by means of things that are made present to the senses. In the case of smoke and animal tracks, the person is made aware of other existing things by means of the implications of their own experience. In the case of human emotion, a range of facial expressions can effectively communicate the emotional aspect of another to the person who perceives these signs. In addition to signifying other created realities (e.g. smoke signifying fire), considered more broadly created things are also signs of God himself, pointing not only to God’s identity as first cause but also revealing something of God’s own transcendental goodness and truth (Augustine, On Christian Teaching 2.I; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [ST] I.13). In this sense, the category of sign is perspectivally conditioned. While a natural thing such as a sound or a rock may be considered in itself, it may also be considered as a sign that points to another reality – as smoke points to fire, or the beauty of a song points to the goodness of God. Understood in this way, the human engagement with created reality is not only saturated by an immediate sensory experience of things, but with the signified implications of these experiences as well – natural signs of this kind point to the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world as a product of divine creative artistry.

Although natural signs certainly hold a great deal of theological significance when considered in light of the doctrine of creation and of God’s role as first cause, the material elements used in the sacraments are not natural signs of this kind. In the most immediate sense, we have seen that natural signs signify other natural realities to which they are intrinsically related (smoke signifying fire); additionally, in a broader sense we may say that all natural things signify God as first cause, whether or not they are understood as signs of other created things. Although comprised of natural elements like bread and flowing water, however, sacramental signs signify spiritual realities, not natural ones – despite the fact that both of these elements may well function as natural signs in some sense (flowing water signifying the force of gravity, for example), this is not the manner in which they are employed when they are used as sacramental signs.

2.2 ‘Conventional’ versus ‘natural’ signs

To understand the nature of sacramental signification, a second Augustinian variety of sign is necessary. In addition to the proper ‘natural’ signs described above, all of which depend on the intrinsic relations among certain created things, and between all created things and God, Augustine argues that the human person also has the ability to construct a different kind of sign by using natural things. These ‘conventional’ or ‘given’ signs (signa data) are different from natural ones precisely because they are constructed. Such conventional signs are used to communicate things sensed and understood to another – indeed, such signs are only intelligible as means of communicating what is within one’s own mind to the mind of another. When such signs are used in a specific circumstance, therefore, they are ‘given’, put forth, or intended by the one who seeks to communicate with the other (On Christian Teaching 2.2; Cameron 1999: 796). Although an individual may certainly construct such signs, established conventional signs of this kind are socially constructed, and remain somewhat particular to the communities of persons in which a consensus about their meaning has been reached. Augustine’s primary example of this understanding of sign is human speech: vocal noises are formed in the mouth of the one speaking and received audibly in the ear of the one who listens – the extent to which these noises constitute a form of true communication rests on an agreement between the speaker and the listener about the meaning of the sounds uttered (On Christian Teaching 2.2). Indeed, such an agreement may be found among a group of persons or even within an entire culture. In this way, language becomes an effective means of communication within a community of persons when a consensus of this kind about the meaning of speech-sounds exists. By extension, written forms of communication rely on a similar consensus about the correspondence between specific visible markings, the spoken words they represent, and the underlying concepts signified by both. This understanding of sign is not restricted to simple communication in the broadest sense – one may communicate with another person about a situational urgency or communicate a basic human need without sharing any linguistic consensus with the other. For example, one might warn another of an imminent danger simply by shouting and gesturing at the threat. Although possibly effective in such circumstances, what this method of communication lacks is a clear communication of the essence of the threat itself – although the other person in question may well infer the nature of the threat themselves after their attention has been directed to it, taken in themselves the rudimentary actions of gesturing and shouting have not functioned as signs in the true sense by communicating the essential identity of this threat to the other person.

Although vague gestures of this kind may be considered signs in the broad sense, they differ from proper conventional signs (linguistic or otherwise) in that they do not effectively signify the essential nature of some idea to another person. In some cases, however, gestures may indeed have an essential meaning that is mutually understood. For example, the palm of a police officer’s hand outstretched towards an oncoming vehicle may well communicate the command ‘stop’, even if the spoken command is not heard or is made in a language that the driver does not understand. Similarly, a red octagonal street sign may well convey the same command through visual symbolism. By contrast, if two persons imagined in this situation shared a common language, the first would be able to speak intelligible words to the other (even while continuing to gesture and shout), and warn the person directly of the oncoming train through the use of spoken linguistic signs. In all these cases, however, what defines conventional signs most fundamentally is that signs of this kind represent an imposition of meaning that builds upon the natural signification of creation. Although language remains Augustine’s primary example of conventional signs in the proper sense, he does extend this category to other visual and auditory signs as well: for example, military banners or trumpets that clearly communicate an instruction to soldiers at a distance. Similarly, traffic signals that direct motorists without printed words through a combination of colour and shape also effectively communicate essential concepts and instructions in a similar way through a shared consensus about the meaning of these signs.

In addition to practical communication, conventional signs can be used to communicate complex ideas and abstract concepts and principles through various mediums that could range from written and spoken language to mathematical symbolism. Often, a culture may rely on an elaborate web of signs of this kind to express its most important values and to develop and convey its most precious forms of knowledge. Culturally conditioned matrixes of this kind may include an array of conventional signs that range from gestures and other outward actions (of either individuals or collective groups) with a clearly understood meaning to spoken and written language, and other forms of visual symbolism. As a matrix of conventional signs, language in both its spoken and written forms has the ability to contribute to the upbuilding of consensus and communion among human persons. Taken as a whole, the effective formation and use of such conventional signs contributes to the upbuilding of a shared cultural collective in which the social and communal ends of human nature can be effectively sustained and nourished. This is not to say that conventional signs are essentially delimited by a narrow understanding of culture, however. Rather than a closed, monadic system of proprietary signs, an individual grouping of culturally conditioned signs is almost certainly embedded within the larger context of previous cultural, linguistic, and intellectual history. In this understanding, the signate complexity that accompanies any human culture not only facilitates interpersonal communication in the immediate sense, but in fact produces an intricate pattern of conventional signs in which a visual or auditory sign resonates not only within the confines of a given culture but at points of wider cultural intersection as well, and ultimately with the human experience of natural things and signs themselves.

In this regard, it must be remembered that the creative malleability of conventional signs remains rooted in the material objectivity of natural things and the concepts that they signify. Therefore, while an individual grouping of signs may well be indebted to certain cultural and historical factors, it is natural things themselves and the natural signs that point to them that provide the basis for the development and use of conventional signs. For example, the English word ‘smoke’ – as it is written on this page and heard when spoken aloud – is a conventional sign that refers to a natural sign. In this case, the natural sign in question is the smoke itself, which signifies the fire as its cause. Following this, a conventional sign is formed within the linguistic world of spoken and written English by a certain auditory sound and by a collection of printed linguistic symbols. As spoken and auditory conventional signs progress in complexity, their signate references continue to rely on those natural signs that populate our sensory experience, even as they also reference other linguistic conventional signs and abstract concepts. Although conventional signs reinforce the importance of sensory experience by relying on natural signs, it is also clear that, as a medium that facilitates communication and mutual understanding, conventional signs are a means to an end. Like all signs, conventional signs point beyond themselves and towards the object they signify.

Considered in their most basic form, sacraments fall within the category of sign. Although rooted in the intelligibility of natural signs, sacraments represent a variety of conventional signs that exists as a commonly understood matrix of sensory signs that reference a set of unseen conceptual realities. The use of water in Christian baptism, for example, employs a grouping of signs that include the visible sign of water washing the body and the spoken words of the minister that accompany this. As a conventional sign made up of these visible and audible elements, as a sacrament baptism is itself a sign that makes itself available to the collective human capacity for complex and culturally-rooted conversations about meaning and truth. Immediately, however, several factors distinguish sacraments from the broader world of conventional signs. Like other conventional signs, sacraments build on existing natural and conventional signs – in the case of baptism, these are water’s natural ability to wash, and the intelligibility of the words spoken as preexisting conventional signs. Taken together, however, these elements form a new conventional sign that signifies a reality that is not already signified by any of the natural or conventional signs that are employed by the sacrament.

2.3 The origin of conventional signs

Within the category of conventional signs, sacraments are further distinguished from other conventional signs in the broad sense because of their point of origin. As we have established above, conventional signs often rely on a social consensus within a culture or other grouping of human persons to establish their meaning – unlike the smoke that naturally signifies fire, the use of the English word ‘fire’ to convey the meaning of this natural sign is itself a conventional sign that represents a consensus among those who share this common language. Often, culturally conditioned conventional signs develop organically as language groups evolve. The words used as conventional signs in the English language, for instance, have shifted with the passage of time and the development of culture to such an extent that, in some cases, a modern English speaker may have difficulty understanding the meaning of those older forms found in Old and Middle English. In addition to these kinds of organic development, however, conventional signs may also be instituted by a relevant authority. In the case of language, the organic model of development seems to predominate – to the extent that rules for grammatical usage are identified and definitions assigned to words by textbooks, dictionaries, and other authoritative sources, these norms tend towards the descriptive, rather than the prescriptive. Although normative bodies that offer rules for linguistic usage certainly exist, these bodies tend to describe the rules and principles that define existing cultural matrixes of conventional linguistic signs. While such descriptions can certainly assist an individual who wishes to use these signs according to existing norms, descriptive rules cannot account for the origin of the usages they describe – in these cases, the origin of these conventional signs remains culturally organic. Understood in this way, the authority that is attributed to those normative bodies that articulate rules and principles of this kind is derived from the accuracy and reliability, and utility, of their descriptions.

Certain kinds of conventional signs do trace their origin to authoritative institution, however. An example of a conventional sign of this kind is a traffic signal. Unlike language, signals of this kind are an example of a species of conventional signs that are normative within a given society, not so much because their meaning developed organically through prolonged use but because a civil body of some kind has established them in that role. It has been shown above that, unlike natural signs that are available immediately to the senses, the intelligibility of conventional signs relies on a social consensus that establishes the meaning of these same signs. While this consensus can develop organically, in certain cases it may also be the product of authoritative institution.

Instituted conventional signs have a special relationship with proscriptive authority. Unlike descriptive authorities, whose authority is derived from their accuracy and utility, entities such as the Department of Transportation of a certain government have proscriptive authority because of their relationship to the common good of a given society taken as a whole. For Thomas Aquinas, the common good is a principle by which human action is directed not to the private good of an individual but rather the collective good of the whole (ST I-II.90.2). While natural reason is sufficient to direct the acts of an individual towards the personal good of that same individual, the task of ordering the common good belongs either to the group of people as a whole or to the one appointed to govern the same people (ST I-II.90.3). Although Aquinas respects the relative dignity of individuals in themselves, in the final analysis the good of the individual is in fact contextualized by the broader social whole, to such an extent that the good of individual human acts in fact find their full identity in the common of the society or group to which they belong (ST I-II.90.3.3). For Aquinas, proscriptive laws that promote the common good are intended to perfect the collective social good of human persons, in which the individual finds the perfection of their own good as a part of the larger whole. In addition to tasks more commonly associated with law-giving, such as preventing injustice and punishing wrongdoing, governing bodies can also use their proscriptive authority to promote other aspects of the common good through the institution of conventional signs for functions of civil society.

In the most immediate sense, the notion of the common good begins when an individual starts to consider their relation to their neighbour – goodness is considered to be held in common when it is no longer private and is shared by more than one individual. From this personalist perspective, the horizon of the common good expands as it comes to include increasingly universal (or ‘common’) realities, finally terminating in God directly. Here, natural realities – even social ones – point beyond themselves to their source. Understood in this way, the concept of the common good is associated with divinity to the extent that these natural realities signify their own participation in God as their exemplar cause. Building on this relationship between natural signs and the common good, instituted conventional signs – which rely on natural signs as their foundation – can be used to effectively promote not only the common good of a social group or a nation, but the most common or universal sense of the good, which is God himself. As will be shown in the following section, the human phenomenon of religion – which has taken many forms in different cultural and historical contexts – is deeply associated with the concept of both natural and conventional signs. Building on this anthropological foundation, the specific Christian usage of signs – or, more specifically, sacraments – in the life of the Church reflects the basic anthropological principles that shape our understanding of the religious dimension of the common good.

3.1 Sign and religion

The preceding sections have endeavoured to show that the concept of signs plays an essential role in the distinctively human engagement with reality. Beginning with Augustine’s distinction between ‘things’ and ‘signs’, we saw that both natural and conventional signs play an integral role in the formation of language, and can contribute to the ordering of society as a whole towards an increasingly universal and even ‘divine’ (or ‘common’) understanding of the good. As a human phenomenon, different forms of religion have manifested themselves in almost every instance of human culture. In the context of human religious expression, broadly considered across the spectrum of its historical, cultural, and denominational manifestations, signs frequently play an important role in the expression of the religious content; often, this applies to both doctrinal content and religious praxis and ceremony. In this respect, many Christian concepts like scripture and liturgy rely extensively on different forms of natural and conventional signs – these explicitly Christian uses of signs, which will be explored in the following section, provide necessary conceptual context for the more specifically defined category of ‘sacrament’. More fundamentally, however, it is important to recognize that these Christian signs – including the concept of sacrament – not only build upon the natural human capacity to utilize signs but also presume the natural capacity of these same signs to adopt a religious valence.

As an anthropological phenomenon, religion includes beliefs and practices that utilize signs in different ways. At the most fundamental level, the religious capacity of signs begins with the relationship between natural things and God as creator. As the first cause of all varieties of created being, God maintains an intrinsic relation to that which he has made; accordingly, it remains possible for created realities to function as natural signs by signifying either another created reality or an aspect of divine reality. A waterfall, for example, might be experienced as beautiful in a natural sense; in another sense, however, the natural beauty of the same waterfall might also signify something of the transcendent goodness of God. As was mentioned previously, there is a sense in which the category of signs remains perspectival: when two persons look at the same waterfall, for example, one might see only a sign of beauty as a natural concept, while the other might see this same natural beauty as a sign of divine goodness. In this way, a religiously informed perception of natural things has the ability to recognize an important network of signs among natural things that points to the divine, in which creation itself is seen as gesturing towards its creator (a notion explored in, for instance, natural theology). Because visible things are the creative product of God according to their nature, natural religious signs remain a perspectival option for the human person that is not immediately dependent on shared culture or an existing networks of conventional signs and is available with a unique degree of immediacy to human experience.

An examination of human history reveals, however, that religion is rarely an exclusively personal reality. All of the religious traditions of the world developed within respective cultural contexts; in many cases, these cultures lent something of their own existing matrixes of conventional signs to various forms of religious expression in the form of language, the visual arts, and other socially constructed conventional signs. Understood from this perspective, there remains a porous border between cultural and religious realities; often, the development of each is deeply intertwined with the other. To use conventional signs in a religious context, therefore, already implies a more fundamental understanding of the social ground in which this species of sign takes form. Concretely, religious signs are often imbedded to a certain extent within the language and artistic traditions of a given culture. For Thomas Aquinas, the concept of religion has an intrinsic connection to the social and cultural dimension of the human person, and the perfection and attainment of those so-called ‘common’ goods that increasingly pertain to the person understood as a part of the whole; as a dimension of the virtue of justice, for Aquinas religion is not conceptualized as an exclusively individual reality, but is essentially ordered towards the common good (ST II-II.81–89). This orientation is particularly appropriate for religion, precisely because the concept of the common good is most fully inhabited by God himself, whose goodness is the common source and exemplar for the goodness of all other things, both in themselves and taken as parts of creation as a whole. Following this pattern, religion’s intrinsic ordering towards not only personal but common goods necessitate that, among the categories of sign already discussed, conventional signs will play an important role in understanding the nature of religious expression and its relationship to the broader social whole.

Taken in themselves, of course, natural religious signs do pertain to the common good in its most perfect instantiation – although they do not originate from the social and cultural environments that produce conventional signs, natural religious signs remain oriented towards an authentically ‘common’ sense of human good and flourishing because they signify God as the most common good of the whole of the created order; as effects signify the nature of their cause (such as smoke with respect to fire), God is present by his essence and divine power to all of creation as his own unique, creative production, which in turn participates in his goodness as an effect participates in its cause (ST I.43.3).

Because of religion’s orientation towards the common good, however, conventional signs are often used to express religious ideas and practices. Even outside of the specifically Judaeo-Christian contexts in which sacraments occur, it is possible for human authorities who bear responsibility for the common good to institute specifically religious laws that are intended to direct the behaviour of individuals and groups towards a divine end. Cicero, for example, identified religious law as a specific kind of civic positive law – instituted and promoted by the Roman state – that specifically governed the rites and observances that constituted the religious life of Roman culture and society. These proscriptive laws governed religious ceremonies and acts such as sacrifices, vows, burial of the dead, and the correct performance of religious rites (Cicero, On the Laws II.19). Whether conventional or natural, however, religious signs can be distinguished from these broader categories of sign by their focus on divine, rather than natural, realities.

Although natural signs play an important role in Christian theology, and in many ways form the backdrop for the concept of sacrament, an intensive definition of sacrament as a concept will in fact fall within the category of conventional signs. More specifically, sacraments are best understood as a kind of ‘instituted’ conventional sign. As will be shown in the following sections, as a distinct variety of instituted conventional signs, sacraments – like other, non-sacramental instituted conventional signs – presume the context of natural signs and existing conventional signs for their intelligibility. However, while natural signs and organically developed conventional signs certainly play an integral role in forming the broader context of intelligibility in which sacramental signs function, the sacraments themselves should not be reduced to either of these categories. The natural world itself or the sociocultural environment of a particular society with a Christian heritage can provide a wealth of both natural and organic conventional signs that point to God; however, as instituted signs, sacraments are formally distinct from these other kinds of signs that might signify religious content in other ways. More than a natural or conventional sign in the usual sense that has the capacity to signify some aspect of the divine, a sacrament like the Eucharist is indebted to a more specific matrix of conventional signs that are proper to the divinely revealed world of the Bible and Christian tradition, even as it builds upon natural and culturally conditioned signs like the association between bread and nourishment. In this regard, the history of God’s revelatory interaction with the family of humanity – sometimes termed ‘salvation history’ – provides a kind of sociocultural context that functions as the broader environment of signate intelligibility for the more specific realities of the sacraments themselves. Beyond the confines of any natural linguistic or sociocultural grouping, certain properly theological concepts, such as the incarnation or the concept of original sin for example, rely on salvation history to provide the conceptual environment in which the intelligibility of such concepts is necessarily rooted. While transcending the confines of any natural human culture, taken in themselves this grouping of theological concepts provides the context for the intelligibility of sacraments as proper conventional signs.

Even within the context of salvation history, however, the Eucharist and other Christian sacraments are distinguished in a second sense by their institution. Unlike other biblical conventional signs that are used to communicate theological content, within the context of salvation history the sacraments are examples of instituted conventional signs. As instituted conventional signs, the sacraments are further distinguished not only from natural signs that can signify divine and religious realities (like waterfalls and sunsets), but from the broader sociocultural environment of organic conventional signs upon which their specific religious intelligibility is based. To distinguish these realities in this fashion is not to isolate them from each other, however. As with culturally conditioned conventional signs, many different natural signs contribute to form the specific vocabulary of religious conventional signs; additionally, as instituted conventional signs build on both organic conventional signs and natural signs, so too do sacraments like the Eucharist rely on both the natural symbolism of bread and wine, and the wider textual world of both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

Like ordinary instituted conventional signs, sacramental signs are instituted to preserve and promote a certain understanding of the common good. We have already seen that human authorities can and do institute conventional signs such as traffic signs that both establish norms for communicating a concept and shape human behaviour accordingly. As the most universal iteration of the common good, God himself is the special object of instituted conventional religious signs. Unlike the Roman religious prescriptions that Cicero describes, however, sacraments are instituted by God himself rather than human authorities. Already existing within the wider context of God’s revelatory engagement with humanity through salvation history, the sacraments emerge against this divinely initiated backdrop as specifically instituted signs that are ordered by God in a special way towards the sanctifying end of revelation itself. In the following section, we will explore the concept of salvation history as the context for the broader matrix of natural and organic conventional signs that provides the special context for the sacraments as divinely instituted religious signs.

3.2 Signs, salvation history, and the church

The literary landscape of the Bible is filled with both natural and conventional religious signs. Like other religious signs, the natural and conventional signs found in the textual world of scripture build upon natural signs available to human experience, and, in some cases, on certain existing conventional signs that remain traceable to human cultural and historical contexts. Biblical signs are distinguished from religious signs more generally, however, by the concept of divine revelation. By contrast, the kinds of religious signs described by Cicero are traceable to human authorities within a given human culture, and the culture’s own social and linguistic development more broadly. Of course, the conceptual world of the Bible is not removed from the contexts and developments of the human cultures in which it took shape – on the contrary, each book of the Bible is in a very real sense the product of human authors and their respective cultural contexts. When considered as a divinely revealed whole, however, the meaning and sense of scripture has an intrinsically supernatural quality that exceeds the scope of natural signs and ordinary conventional signs that contribute to its construction. Without discounting the importance of studying the history and context of individual biblical books, a theologically conditioned approach to scripture places the text as a whole within the wider context of God’s overarching revelatory plan, as a specific mode of divine interaction with human persons. What distinguishes this mode of divine interaction from other, preexisting divine–human relationships (such as that formed by God’s act of creation, for example) is the salvific and divinizing end of God’s revelatory interaction with the human family. As creator, God establishes a special relationship with those things – and especially those persons – that he creates; we have already seen that the world of natural signs can be used to speak of this relationship in a religious manner, acknowledging God as creator and reverencing him in this capacity. As creator, God continues to sustain and promote those things that he has made, working to bring them to perfection according to their proper natures. Although God certainly reveals something of himself in creation, God’s supernatural revelation extends beyond this, not only by making known previously unrevealed divine content but by working towards a specifically salvific end for the human person. Extending and progressively unfolding across many different human families, cultures, and even civilizations, this salvific mode of divine interaction with humanity takes on a kind of historicity that reflects the overarching project of its divine author, even as it is woven into individual human cultures and historical contexts. Understood in this way, the term salvation history has been used to describe the unique pattern that demarcates the specific relationship between God and humanity that is motivated by God’s overarching salvific intent.

We have seen previously that conventional signs (whether organic or instituted), rely by their nature on the social fabric of human culture to provide matrixes for their intelligibility and interpretation. In a similar way, although beyond the categories of culture in any conventional sense of the term, as a kind of social reality salvation history generates a unique world of proprietary signs that signify realities within the unique historicity of God’s salvific engagement with the human family. Because this historicity is salvific, the things it contains and signifies are rightly understood as holy realities. The incarnation of the Word stands at the heart of these divinely revealed realities. Through the incarnation, the full salvific intent of God is concretized and realized in human history – the initial epochs of salvation history progressed towards the historical inflection point of the enfleshment of the Word in Bethlehem, and continues to work towards the realization of the incarnate Word’s effects within the hearts of believers. Because it is God’s salvific intent that characterizes the project of revelation, the divine realities that comprise salvation history are therefore found in the historical events that comprise God’s past interactions with humanity, his work in the present, and that which will unfold in the future. By divine intention, revelation is salvific and divinizing. Viewed from the sapiential perspective of divine wisdom itself, therefore, the whole of this reality culminates in and pivots around the incarnation and its effects. In the present, the unfolding of the effects of the incarnation take hold in the hearts of believers such that they are related to God, and to each other, in a new way. The social intersubjectivity of the life of grace, therefore, provides a collective context in which the holy realities of God’s revelatory and salvific acts, although certainly experienced deeply by each individual, are nonetheless not confined by the personal subjectivity of individual experience. Rather, these same holy realities are experienced more broadly as commonalities that mark and shape the body of Christ as a kind of social whole.

As a matrix of conventional signs proper to the realities of salvation history, the textuality of scripture provides a linguistic and conceptual backdrop against which the sacraments are defined. By their nature, sacraments rely on scripture for their intelligibility as signs. The sacrament of baptism, for example, relies on the biblical world: the symbolism of water washing recalls past events from salvation history, even as its promise of rebirth gestures towards the present and future as well. In the case of baptism, examples of these past scriptural events would include Noah’s ark in the flood, the exodus from Egypt through the Red Sea, the baptisms of John the Baptist, and Christ’s own baptism at the beginning of his earthly ministry. Where scripture can describe past, present, and future salvific realities in more general terms, the full import of these holy realities is realized in their personal application. All signs point to realities (res) – in the case of the sacraments, the res in question is the reality of grace that has come to life in the believer. Although certainly contextualized by the larger conceptual realities and historical events of salvation history (res), the birth of new life in grace within the heart of each human person is itself a distinct reality, distinguished by a personal historicity and individual existence of the unique person in question. Grace, therefore – understood not in terms of a theological concept or a biblical promise but instead as a personal, life-giving reality – is the res in question that is signified by the sacraments. While scripture itself may certainly be taken to signify this personal reality more generally, as a sign a sacrament like baptism signifies the discrete coming-to-be of the more general realities of salvation history within human life and experience in a more concrete and particularized sense.

At the outset of this section, we began by describing salvation history as a set of holy realities (res), comprised of both historical events, divine promises, and attendant theological concepts that originate from a revelatory interaction between God and the human family that is motivated by God’s salvific intent. Because of their supernatural quality and divinizing effect on human nature, these realities (res) are rightly called holy. We have also seen that the semantic and conceptual world of scripture is shaped as a matrix of conventional signs that point to these holy things (res). Considered in the general sense, both sacraments and scripture belong to the genre of signs that point specifically to these holy realities (res). What differentiates sacramental signs from scripture within this genus of conventional signs, however, is their specific reference to the sanctification of a human individual – or a group of human individuals – that differentiate sacramental signs from other conventional signs that are found within the context of salvation history. It would be incorrect, however, to think of these more general and more particular kinds of holy things as separated entirely from one another – indeed, the connection between them is analogical. Beyond the semantic similarity that unites them both as holy (sacra, sanctus), there is a deeper, causal connection that identifies the particular as an effect of the more general. As God’s goodness is the cause of all particular instances of goodness in created things, the humanity made holy by its union with Christ’s divinity in the incarnation is the cause of all holiness; sacramental signs point to these particular, incarnational effects – the life of grace – within those who redeemed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a sign of a holy thing, therefore, a sacrament like baptism is more than a linguistic description of a theological concept – properly understood, it signifies an event.

We have seen that, like other matrixes of linguistic signs, scripture is properly understood as a species of conventional sign. Recall that in the case of organic conventional signs, consensus about the meaning of signs (such as language) develops gradually over time; in the case of instituted conventional signs, however, the meaning of the sign is imposed by someone in a position to do so. Although the development of human culture and the historical context of its human authors certainly contribute to the formation of scripture, because their full meaning is imposed by God through divine revelation, the world of biblical symbolism is best understood as a specific, divinely instituted set of signs that point to the holy realities (res) of divine revelation that concern both God himself and his salvific, divinizing intentions for human nature in Christ. Like scripture considered more generally, sacramental signs are also divinely instituted. We have seen, however, that sacramental signs are distinguished by their reference to the specific application of the effects of the incarnation to human persons. As divinely instituted signs, sacraments can be further distinguished by the nature of their institution: sacraments are instituted not only to communicate concepts, but for our use.

Sacraments are characterized by the fact that they are events. In this context, their institution as conventional signs includes not only the imposition of meaning – as the symbolism of the exodus from Egypt conveys divine protection and election – but an injunction to do something specific in the present. In this sense, sacraments are performative signs. While scripture describes the sanctification of the human person through the application of incarnational effects, as divinely instituted realities sacraments include an instruction that shapes our behaviour accordingly. For example, while the sacrament of baptism is certainly described in scripture, the actual reality of the sacrament itself has an existence in the life and practice of the Church that is distinct from its scriptural descriptions. Where scripture is essentially a linguistic reality (whether experienced in either auditory or written form), as signs sacraments make use of both visible things and spoken concepts. Like other instituted conventional signs, the sacraments are complex realities that draw on a range of different sensory and experiential realities. As realities for our use, the sacraments of the Church are comprised of both tactile and verbal elements that come together to form a single, signate reality. The sacrament of baptism, for example, includes the use of water as a physical element, and words spoken by the minister. Using an analogy drawn from Greek philosophy, sacraments are commonly described as composed of ‘matter’ and ‘form’. Within the context of his own vocabulary of ‘things’ and ‘signs’, Augustine describes sacraments as a combination of word and element that come together in a sacrament to form a ‘visible word’ that conforms the eternal mystery to the visible, material present (Contra Faustum 19). The distention between matter and form plays a critical role in identifying sacraments as unique realities within the broader context of salvation history and biblical symbolism. As events in the Church’s present, sacraments exist as a special genre of performative signs that not only evoke the biblical past but signify the present reality of the sacraments as signs as well.

3.3 Sacraments as signs: intensive definitions

In the preceding sections of this article, we examined a number of larger definitional categories in which sacraments participate in some way, or with which they are associated to a certain extent. We established that, prior to any discussion of religion or Christian sacramental theology, the concept of sign is intrinsically connected to the human experience of reality, and the construction of language and culture. While the meaning of natural signs can be traced to human sensory perception of nature directly, other kinds of signs arise in the context of social and cultural groups, and these can be used in a society to work towards the common good (section 2). Because of the integral connection between conventional signs and culture, religiously oriented systems of signs can (and do) arise organically within cultures, gesturing towards the divine and expressing the human need for worship. While natural signs have the capacity to speak in religious terms of God as their ultimate cause, the category of conventional signs is also capable of constructing matrixes of religious signs that convey religious beliefs and practices. As author of the common good, God himself is also able to institute conventional signs that direct the human impulse for the divine to himself – in God’s revelatory interaction with the human family in salvation history, God institutes a matrix of conventional signs that culminate in and centre around the incarnation. Within this broader context of incarnational signs, as divinely instituted signs sacraments signify specifically the application of the effects of the incarnation.

Historically, Augustine’s distinction between ‘things’ and ‘signs’ played an important role in the formation of the Church’s understanding of the sacraments in the Latin West. Augustine himself uses these concepts to describe the Christian sacraments of baptism and Eucharist (On Christian Teaching 3.9). Aspects of Augustine’s approach were later adopted by medieval theologians such as Hugh of St Victor and Peter Lombard, each of whom used Augustine’s doctrine of ‘things’ and ‘signs’ to describe sacraments of the Church. In book four of his Sentences (IV.1.2), Lombard offers three Augustinian definitions of sacrament: in one sense, a sacrament can be understood as a ‘sign of a sacred thing’ (The City of God 10.5); alternatively, a sacrament is ‘a sacred secret’ (Expositions on the Psalms 103.3.14). Finally, a sacrament is a ‘visible form of invisible grace’ (Questions on the Heptateuch 3.84). Because of the wide diffusion of this text, Lombard’s selection of Augustinian texts proved influential. For Lombard, sacraments represent a special category of what Augustine terms conventional signs, further distinguished from other kinds of conventional signs by a specific manner of likeness – alluding to On Christian Teaching again, Lombard argues that ‘a sacrament bears a likeness of the thing whose sign it is’ (see On Christian Teaching 2.1). Expanding on this, Lombard argues that sacraments are a ‘form of invisible grace’ in the Augustinian sense because ‘it bears its image and is its cause’ (Sentences IV.1.4). In a similar vein, the earlier Hugh of St Victor argues that in sacraments, sensible material elements become signs of invisible spiritual grace, not only signifying this grace but also making it present by similitude and containing the invisible sanctification they confer (On The Sacraments of the Christian Faith I.9.2). These fundamental Augustinian definitions of sacrament found in Lombard’s Sentences continued to be influential for both Catholic and Protestant authors well into the early modern period (Cary 2008). In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, for example, John Calvin adopts two of the three Augustinian definitions of sacrament mentioned in Lombard’s Sentences: a sacrament as a ‘visible sign of a sacred thing’, and a ‘visible form of invisible grace’ (Institutes 14.1).

As argued above, the concept of divine institution in the context of salvation history differentiates sacraments from other forms of conventional signs that arise from human culture in a natural sense. Although Catholics and Protestants have disagreed about other factors, divine institution remained a consistent feature of historically significant accounts of Christian sacraments from Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed theologians. Further intensive definition of sacramental signs, however, requires an account of the reason for the divine institution of this specific category of conventional sign; we have already established that, within the context of salvation history, sacraments are further differentiated from the conventional signs found in sacred scripture as liturgical or ceremonial events for our use in the Church’s present. In the passages quoted above, Hugh and Lombard argue that the sacraments cause or make present the holy realities they signify. To what extent should the notions of efficacy or causality be included in a definition of sacrament? To illustrate the efficacy of the sacraments, Lombard uses Augustine’s definition of signs in On Christian Teaching (2.1): ‘a sign is a thing which, over and above the form which it impresses on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind through itself’ (Sentences IV.1.3; Lombard 2007 [vol. 4.4]).

During the Middle Ages, the relationship between the efficacy of the incarnation and the sacraments as instrumental causes of the incarnation’s effects became an increasingly important topic of conversation (Lynch 2017). Should an intensive definition of sacramental signs include the concepts of efficacy or causality? Do sacraments ‘contain’ the grace they effect? We have already argued above that an intensive definition situates the concept ‘sacrament’ within a genre of signs specific to the life of the Church that is intrinsically connected to the efficacy of the incarnation. How should the relationship between the efficacy of the incarnation and the sacraments be characterized? Are sacraments only signs of what the incarnation effects? Although answers to this question outside of the Roman Catholic tradition may break down along confessional lines, to a certain extent an initial answer to this question depends on the scope to which the term sacrament is extended in relation to salvation history – is ‘sacrament’ a kind of genus that includes different species, containing within itself the separate cases of the ceremonies of the pre-incarnational Law and those of the post-incarnational Church? Aquinas, for example, extends the use of the term sacrament to the ceremonies of the ‘Old Law’ (such as temple sacrifice), with the caveat that what they signify is the future efficacy of the incarnation (ST III.60.2.2). Lombard, by contrast, limits the term sacrament to those ‘New Law’ ceremonies that are instituted by God not only to signify but to sanctify as well, preferring to describe the rites of the Old Law as signs rather than sacraments in the proper sense (Sentences IV.1.4; see also Law in the New Testament).

To a certain extent, the difference between these views may seem to be semantic. The approaches of both Aquinas and Lombard reflect a consensus that the efficacy of the incarnation is an essential component of the concept ‘sacrament’ – whether as an anticipated reality in the signs of the Old Law or as a reality made present in the context of the Church. In his treatment of sacraments as ‘visible words’ in Contra Faustum, Augustine invokes a kind of grammatical analogy, arguing that realities signified that are either past or future are made present to us by a process that imitates the conjugation of words. The sacraments of the New Law are more perfect than those of the Old because they not only foreshadow Christ, but contain a likeness of what Christ has done (Contra Faustum 19.16). For Aquinas, it is the causal efficacy of the sacraments of the New Law that differentiate them from those of the Old, as a species within the larger genus sacrament – while all sacraments signify Christ, the sacraments of the New Law are instituted to cause in us the grace by which we are incorporated into Christ’s body (ST III.60.62).

Other voices in the Middle Ages take a more occasionalistic stance – the sacraments are instituted as occasions which, if performed correctly, result in God causing grace directly in those who receive the sacraments. Examples of this approach can be found in Bernard of Clairvaux (Sermo in cena Domini 2), William of Auvergne (De Legibus 27), and John Duns Scotus (in his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences IV.1.4–IV.5.16). Concerning the question of efficacy, to say that sanctifying grace that takes root within the individual believer is caused by God is relatively uncontroversial. But does God cause this sanctification by means of the sacraments? In contrast to the occasionalist view, Aquinas sees the sacraments as true instrumental causes that operate under the agency of God as principal agent – as the sharpness of an axe can be used for the construction of a house, material elements like water and spoken words can be used by God as the architect of human salvation. In this understanding, both the humanity of Christ and the sacraments function as instruments of divine efficacy, the first in a conjoined, the second in a separated sense – like an arm conjoined to a body and a stick held in the hand, the humanity of Christ and the sacraments, respectively, function as instruments of Christ’s divinity (ST III.1–2, III.62; see also Lynch 2017).

Many classical Protestant accounts of sacramental efficacy are closer to the occasionalism of Bernard and Duns Scotus than to the instrumental causality of Aquinas. The image of a coin, for example – the value of which is derived only from the authority of the one who declares it a currency – which emerged in thirteenth-century scholasticism as a counterpoint to descriptions of the sacraments as efficient instrumental causes, and was popularized by late scholastic nominalists, can be found in Calvin’s Institutes as well, where he uses this example to illustrate the sacraments as signs instituted for our use by divine command (Institutes 14.18; see also Courtenay 1972). For Calvin, there is no power of any kind at work in sacraments themselves (Institutes 14.9). Calvin connects this understanding of sacrament to the notion of divine covenant and, using an argument from John Chrysostom, links the signification of the sacraments to the corporeal condition of the human person. For Calvin, the visible and corporeal nature of sacraments ‘seals’ and ‘confirms’ the covenantal promise, attesting to this reality and strengthening our profession of faith in it (Institutes 14.3–4). Calvin argues that Christ instituted the sacraments explicitly to both establish and increase our faith (Institutes 14.9). Martin Luther agrees in large part, insisting that it is the distinction between faith and works that distinguishes the sacraments of the New Law from those of the Old, and that the efficacy of the sacraments is found only in the faith they signify rather than the sacraments themselves (Babylonian Captivity 531–532). Ulrich Zwingli is also quick to deny any efficacy to the sacraments themselves, describing them instead as signs of the divine promise (On the Providence of God, as in Hinke 1992: 194). From the Catholic perspective, the Council of Trent forcefully charted a different course in its seventh session in 1547, arguing that sacraments cannot be reduced to outward signs of grace or of justification by faith – rather, the sacraments of the New Law contain the grace they signify (On the Sacraments in General: canon VI). For the English Reformation, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, finalized in 1571, take a step away from the notion of sacraments as signs and ‘seals’ of faith alone, describing sacraments as ‘effectual signs of grace’ (Article 25).

In addition to institution and efficacy, two further questions that influence intensive definitions of sacrament are those of permanence and number. Are the effects of the sacrament permanent? Are the sacramental rites themselves repeatable? Although initially baptism was sometimes repeated in cases of schism and serious sin in the North African Church, Augustine strongly defended the permanence and non-repeatability of the sacrament of baptism, even if the use of the sacrament in charity were lost through sin or schism (On Baptism). After the fourth century, certain sacraments like baptism and holy orders (and later confirmation in the West) were considered unrepeatable, while other sacraments like the Eucharist were understood as intended for repetition and regular use by design. The Catholic Church has maintained that baptism is unrepeatable. Although many Protestant denominations share this stance, disagreements over the practice of infant baptism let to the practice of rebaptism or even repeated baptism among the denominations of the Anabaptist movement.

The number of sacraments has also been the subject of historical disagreement. As mentioned at the outset, the Catholic Church acknowledges seven distinct sacraments: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, anointing, holy orders, and marriage. We have already introduced the question of the status of the ceremonies of the Old Law – if these are included in the genus ‘sacrament’, the number of the whole is greatly increased. Regarding the sacraments of the Church under the New Law, however, various numbers have been proposed. Although the seven sacraments named by the Council of Trent and the Council of Florence were relatively commonplace in the Latin Middle Ages, earlier authors are sometimes less clear about the number of sacraments and the real distinction between different sacraments. For example, Augustine’s use of the term sacramentum is much more broad conceptually, and earlier patristic accounts in both the East and the West do not typically differentiate between baptism and confirmation as separate sacraments. While Luther acknowledges three sacramental signs (baptism, Eucharist, and penance), Calvin, Zwingli and the Thirty-Nine Articles identify only baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the two sacraments instituted by Christ.