Sacraments and Visible Words

Augustine famously declared that the sacraments are bodily things and actions that function as “certain visible words.” Sacraments are word-like, but operate in the visual rather than the audible sphere.  And the analogy between the two is often taken to be communication: Words teach us audibly, sacraments teach the same things visibly.

What impresses Augustine about language, though, is not its ability to communicate.  Early on, in fact, he wrote a treatise ( de Magistro ) demonstrating that words teach us nothing, but rather the only Teacher is the Christ within.  He didn’t stick with that model of language, but neither did he completely abandon the argument of de Magistro. What impresses Augustine about words is not so much their capacity to communicate as their temporality.

In the passage in Contra Faustum 19.16 where he identifies sacraments as “visible words,” he immediately adds:

“what else are certain bodily sacraments but but certain visible words – sacred, of course, but still changeable and temporal.  For God is eternal, and yet the water and all that bodily action which is carried out when we baptize, and which takes place and passes, is not eternal.  There again, unless those quickly sounded and passing syllables are spoken when we say ‘God’ [i.e., Deus ], there is no consecration.  All these take place and pass away; they sound and pass away.  Yet the power that works through them remains constant, and the spiritual gift that is signified by them is eternal.”

The temporality of words is at the heart of Augustine’s argument in Book 19.  He is addressing the Manichean misunderstanding of Jesus’ declaration that He came to fulfill and not destroy the law, and argues that sacraments of the old law were prophetic of the Christ to come.  Now that Christ has come, the old rites are no longer necessary, and they are in fact forbidden to Gentiles who did not receive the gospel through the medium of the law.  He defends this view by drawing an analogy between the conjugation of verbs and the change in the sacraments of the church.  Under the old covenant, it was correct to say “Christ will come”; under the new, that declaration is conjugated to “Christ has come.”  Just so, it was correct to practice the prophetic rite of circumcision so long as Christ was yet to come, but now that Christ has come we no longer practice the rites of anticipation.

Sacraments are visible words, in short, because a) they are passing, temporal bodily actions, just as words are evanescent vibrations of air and b) because sacraments conjugate.