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Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of taking life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit.
To some extent this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism, revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in the relative though none in the absolute sense.
The whole strength of their appeal to members of the Church lay in men's weariness of the high and dry optimism, which presents the existing order of things as the noblest possible, and the undisturbed way of the majority as the way of salvation. Apostolical succession and Sacramentalism may not have been in themselves progressive ideas.
Plato in the Phaedo says that 'those who established our mysteries declare that all who come to Hades uninitiated will lie in the mud; while he who has been purified and initiated will dwell with the gods'. For, as they say in the mysteries, 'Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the inspired'. This sacramentalism was not unchallenged, as we have already seen from Plato himself.
He said that hitherto all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or as in the case of the Egyptian temples to some particular star, and by sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other lines than that.
This principle of the mediation of the spiritual by the material is the principle of sacramentalism. It is the principle of incarnation, which runs throughout the world. The body is in this sense the sacrament of the spirit, sound is the sacrament of speech, and language the sacrament of thought.
Sacramentalism. The stumbling block, the apparently impassable barrier, is that which was erected when belief was substituted for faith; it is the intellectualizing of religion that has brought about the present failure of Christianity as a vital and controlling force in man and in society.
It is much more free from sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient blood sacrifice, and its associated sacerdotalism, than Christianity. The religion that will presently sway mankind can be reached more easily from that starting-point than from the confused mysteries of Trinitarian theology. Islam was never saddled with a creed.
There alone in the whole round world do you find that combination of lofty doctrine, magnificent moral teaching, the frank recognition of the Cross; sacramentalism logically carried out, yet gripping the heart as no amateur mysticism can do; and miracles. "Mercy and Truth have met together."
Catholicism, on the other hand, bears witness to the glory of Churchmanship, to the importance of corporate loyalty to the Christian Society, to the value of sacramentalism, and the rich heritage of ancient devotional traditions, of liturgical worship and ordered ecclesiastical life.
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