Particular comments on no. 1505 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Introduction
The concrete gestures of Christ—touching, breathing, anointing, mixing clay, washing and blessing—are not mere pious stagings. They reveal a profound theology rooted in the very structure of reality and in the history of salvation. In God made man, invisible grace is communicated by visible means, and the sensible world becomes a pathway to the divine.
This dynamic, which unites matter and spirit, not only manifests the mystery of the Incarnation, but also realises the fundamental principles of Aristotelian metaphysics: matter and form, act and potency. By assuming matter, the Incarnate Word redeems it and transforms it into an instrument of grace; clay, water, touch and the word become vehicles of divine presence.
Yet this concrete way in which God acts already endures from the Old Testament: the people of Israel were schooled to recognise the invisible through material signs. The bronze serpent set up in the desert (Nm 21:8–9) healed those who looked upon it; the Ark of the Covenant, made of wood and gold, became the throne of the divine presence (Ex 25:10–22); the manna and the cloud were tangible signs of God’s care during the Exodus; the stones from the Jordan, taken from the river’s bed, served as a memorial of the people’s crossing (Jos 4:6–7).
These symbols were not idolatry, but sacred pedagogy: they pointed to the truth that the God of Israel, though transcendent, allows Himself to be found in the concrete. Judaism thus formed a veritable ‘symbolic physics’, where matter mediated the mystery. Healing, sacrifice, anointing and blessing always involved visible, bodily gestures—an expression of the covenant between heaven and earth.
It is within this horizon that Christ’s deeds are fully understood. The Incarnate Word assumes and fulfils this ancestral language, revealing that all the signs of the Old Covenant—the serpent, the ark, the manna and the temple—found their fullness in Him. He is the real Presence of God in the sensible world, the substance behind all signs. Thus, every gesture in the Gospel—touching the leper, clay upon the eyes, breathing upon the disciples—is not a mere physical miracle, but the fulfilment of a whole divine pedagogy: God allows Himself to be touched so that man may learn anew to see the invisible.
The theological motive: the Incarnation
Christian theology is born of John’s confession: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1:14). In Christ, the eternal Logos enters history, assuming matter in order to redeem it. As Saint Augustine observes (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3):
‘The Word became flesh so that, through the flesh, it might be possible for us to touch the Word. Visible signs are the Word’s words made visible.’
The use of material elements in the miracles of Jesus (the saliva that opens the blind man’s eyes, the touch that cleanses the leper, the water changed into wine) reveals that matter participates in the economy of salvation. Grace is not an abstract idea, but a divine energy that permeates the real. Thus, the Incarnate Christ not only teaches spiritual truths: He touches, transforms and sanctifies creation, showing that the sensible world can be a sacrament of the invisible.
Nevertheless, this pedagogy of the Incarnation is rooted in a prior drama: wounded by original sin, man lost the capacity to perceive the spiritual. The gaze of the soul, which formerly contemplated God in the transparency of creation, became opaque. Sin did not destroy the thirst for the divine, but diverted it; turning towards the world, man lost the path of return.
Then God, in His infinite condescension, comes down to meet man. The Incarnation is the inverse movement of the Fall: Heaven seeking Earth, the Father going out in search of His scattered children, the Shepherd going after the lost sheep. The invisible becomes visible not only to be contemplated, but to rebuild the broken bridge between the human and the divine.
As Saint John Chrysostom teaches (Homilies on Matthew, 25.2):
‘The Lord uses the sensible to lead to the spiritual, because in our weakness we cannot bear divine things unless we see them with our eyes.’
In the Gospels, Jesus makes the sensible the door of grace: the deaf man is cured when He touches his ears; the paralytic, when he hears the word of command; the blind man, when the clay touches his eyes. Each gesture is an embodied catechesis. This divine pedagogy translates an integral anthropology: man is body and soul, and the road to the spirit passes through the body.
By becoming flesh, God speaks to us in the only language we can fully understand: that of sensible experience, where touch, gaze and word become instruments of salvation.
Sacramental anticipation
Christ’s healing gestures are not mere isolated signs; they are proto-sacraments, that is, anticipations of the way He would continue to act in the Church throughout the ages. The logic that undergirds them is the same as that of the sacraments: matter and form, sensible act and invisible grace.
The water of Baptism, the oil of Anointing, the bread and wine of the Eucharist are prolongations of the Incarnation in time—means by which the Incarnate Word continues to touch and transform humanity.
Saint Thomas Aquinas explains this structure with masterly clarity:
‘It befits the human condition that divine grace be conferred upon us by sensible signs, for man is led from bodily realities to spiritual ones.’
(Summa Theologiae, III, q.61, a.1)
God, therefore, does not despise matter; He assumes it as His instrument. Christ heals by touch, and the Church, continuing His mission, administers grace through visible things: clay, oil, water, bread and wine—realities which the divine word transforms into vehicles of supernatural life.
Each miraculous gesture of Jesus is, therefore, a visible prophecy of sacramental life, a concrete anticipation of the way God chose to remain present in the world.
The theological meaning of the proto-sacraments
The term proto-sacrament (protosacramentum) does not belong to the Church’s dogmatic vocabulary, but to later theological language that sought to describe the sacramental dynamic already at work in Christ’s gestures.
In a precise sense, proto-sacraments are the acts and signs performed by Jesus that prefigure, institute and announce the sacramental mode of grace. They are not yet the sacraments in their full form, conferred by the Church after Easter, but inaugural acts—living signs of the new divine economy.
In Christ’s miracles the sacramental logic of the New Covenant is already manifest: the union of body and spirit, matter and grace, gesture and invisible power. When the Gospel recounts that the Lord heals the blind man with clay and saliva (Jn 9:6), we glimpse Baptism, wherein water purifies and enlightens. When He touches the paralytic and pronounces the word of forgiveness (Mk 2:5), He anticipates the sacrament of Reconciliation, in which body and word become instruments of spiritual healing. The multiplication of the loaves and the Last Supper foreshadow the mystery of the Eucharist, whilst the anointing of the sick with oil (Mk 6:13) announces the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick.
Thus each gesture of Christ is a seed of a future sacrament—the anticipatory revelation of how divine grace would become sensibly accessible.
The notion of proto-sacraments arises in medieval scholastic theology, when Christian masters sought to distinguish between the signs of the Old Law and the sacraments of the New Covenant.
Among the pioneers is Hugh of Saint Victor (12th c.), who in De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei (I, 9.2) offers the definition that would shape the whole subsequent tradition:
‘We call a sacrament every bodily celebration that represents a spiritual grace under the veil of mystery.’
Although Saint Hugh does not use the prefix proto-, he describes precisely Christ’s gestures as visible foundations of the new economy of grace, anticipating what later theologians would call proto-sacraments.
This intuition reaches maturity in Saint Thomas Aquinas who, without using the term, fully develops the concept. In the Summa Theologiae (III, q.60–65), the Angelic Doctor teaches that ‘all the sacraments proceed from the Incarnate Christ, the source of all sanctification’ (ST III, q.62, a.5), and adds that ‘in Christ the sacraments existed in figure before being handed on to the Church’ (ST III, q.64, a.3 ad 2).
Before they were ecclesial rites and institutions, the sacraments existed as real gestures of the Word made flesh. Before being administered by the Church, they were lived and signified by Christ in the direct encounter between man and God.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, this line was taken up by great theologians such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar and Karl Rahner, who reinterpreted the concept in a Christological key. Henri de Lubac, in Corpus Mysticum (1944), affirmed that Christ is the ‘primordial sacrament’ of God, because in Him ‘the invisible becomes visible and grace is communicated in fullness.’ Karl Rahner, in Schriften zur Theologie (vol. 4, 1960), takes up the same thought with the German term Ur-Sakrament:
‘Christ is the primordial sacrament of the encounter between God and man.’
These formulations distinguish two complementary levels: Christ as the absolute Proto-sacrament—the original sacrament, the visible presence of God Himself in the world; and the gestures of Christ as particular proto-sacraments—foundational signs that prefigure the seven sacraments and reveal their logic.
Thus the sacramental mystery is not born only after Easter; it already blossoms in Jesus’s earthly life—in the words that forgive, in the touches that heal, in the gestures that communicate grace.
Clay, water, oil, bread and wine—simple elements of creation—become, in His hands, instruments of encounter between the divine and the human. In brief, the concept of proto-sacrament expresses the conviction that the Church’s sacramental action is the historical continuation of Christ’s incarnate action. The very power that touched the blind man’s eyes and cleansed the leper remains alive in the sacraments that today touch, wash, forgive and feed the faithful.
The Incarnation, therefore, is not only the beginning of salvation: it is the sacramental principle of history.
The personal dimension of touch
Among all Christ’s gestures, touch holds a singular place. It is the gesture of divine closeness—the sacrament of embodied compassion. In the Gospels, Jesus rarely heals at a distance; He touches the leper (Mk 1:41), touches the eyes of the blind (Mt 9:29), takes Jairus’s daughter by the hand (Mk 5:41), lays hands on the sick (Lk 4:40). These gestures are not mere vehicles of power, but expressions of love that becomes contact: grace that does not fear to draw near to misery.
In first-century Jewish society, touch was strictly regulated by the laws of ritual purity. Touching a leper, a corpse, or a woman with a flow of blood rendered one impure (Lev 13–15). These norms were not merely sanitary but symbolic: they marked the distance between the holy and the profane.
Hence the touch of Christ is theologically revolutionary: it inverts the logic of impurity, showing that divine holiness is not contaminated but purifies what it touches. As Saint Gregory the Great teaches (Homilies on the Gospels, 32.1):
‘The Lord touched the leper, and the leper was cleansed; for purity came to the impure, and the impurity did not stain the purity.’
The touch of Christ is thus theology in act. It makes visible what doctrine will express in words: grace is a concrete reality that passes from one body to another, communicating life. Every miracle is a small Pentecost—an irradiation of the Spirit through the humanity of Jesus. His body becomes the sacrament of the divine presence, and His touch, the visible prolongation of Trinitarian love.
Yet this gesture is not impersonal. The miracle, before being an act of power, is an encounter. Jesus does not heal anonymous crowds; He comes close to each one by name, He looks, speaks and touches. Physical contact restores spiritual contact: the person is seen again, recognised, loved.
In the leper, touch restores the right to be touched; in the haemorrhaging woman, it restores communion with the community and with God. Healing is more than biological: it is relational redemption, the reconstitution of God’s image in man.
This personal dimension explains why, in the Gospels, faith is always requested. Jesus touches, but calls for inner correspondence: ‘Do you believe that I am able to do this?’ (Mt 9:28). The divine touch does not annul human freedom; it awakens it, and grace does not act without the consent of love.
As Saint John Chrysostom teaches, ‘He touches to heal and asks to awaken faith, for grace does not work without the consent of human love.’
Theology recognises in this dynamism a pedagogy of the Incarnation. Christ works through the senses in order to lead man—who had lost contact with the spiritual—back to communion with the invisible. In the miracles, this pedagogy is immediate; in the sacraments, it becomes permanent and ecclesial.
The same touch that healed the leper continues in the laying on of hands of Confirmation and Holy Orders; the same saliva that opened the blind man’s eyes is reborn in the water of Baptism; the same body that fed the disciples at the Supper continues to nourish the faithful in the Eucharist.
Touch, therefore, is the supreme symbol of the Incarnation in act: God does not save from afar; He touches man so that man may touch God again. The distance between Creator and creature is overcome by the hand that is extended, by the flesh that communicates grace. In Christ’s touch, theology becomes flesh and the flesh becomes theology.
Aristotelian metaphysics and a theology of matter
Aristotle’s philosophy provides the rational structure that supports the Christian understanding of this divine pedagogy. For him, every corporeal reality is composed of matter (hylē) and form (morphē): matter is potency—what can yet be—whilst form is act—what actualises and gives being.
In the miracles, Christ acts precisely upon matter—the sick body, the water, the clay—by His word and gesture. The divine word is the act that actualises the latent potency in the creature. The blind man can see (potency), and Christ’s touch makes him see (act). The deaf man can hear, and the word makes him hear. The miracle is, therefore, a metaphysical actualisation: created matter reaches its perfection when touched by the Form of forms, the Incarnate Word.
Thus, building on Aristotelian theory, God is like Pure Act (actus purus), without potentiality—the final cause of all. In Christ, Thomas Aquinas recognises this same Pure Act working within history. The Logos, subsistent Form, touches matter and raises it to its end:
‘Just as nature acts through visible secondary causes, so God acts through sensible causes to raise us to the invisible first cause.’
(Summa Theologiae, III, q.61, a.1, ad 2)
Each miracle, then, is a metaphysical epiphany: the creature’s potency is actualised by God’s Pure Act. Christ is the Form that informs and transforms matter, revealing that creation is sacramental in its very structure.
Sensible symbolism in Judaism
The Jewish culture of Jesus’s time already possessed a deep awareness of the symbolic efficacy of matter. The rabbis spoke of the shekinah—the presence of God who ‘dwells’ in the sensible. Every ritual gesture was a visible mediation of the invisible: the water of ablutions (purification); the oil of anointing (authority and healing); the blood of the lamb (covenant and expiation).
The Talmud (Berakhot 35a) teaches:
‘A man is not permitted to enjoy this world without a blessing; whoever does so is as though he has stolen from God.’
That is, the material was seen as sacred in potency: it required word, gesture and blessing to reveal its divine finality.
Jesus acts within this logic: He does not abrogate the signs, but brings them to fulfilment. He is the true Rabbi who teaches with hands, voice and matter. His miracles do not break with Judaism; they fulfil it in a Christological key, for the symbolic physics of the rabbis finds in Christ its point of convergence: God who allows Himself to be touched.
Illness, curse and restoration: the public meaning of healing
In Israel’s religious imagination, illness was not merely a physical condition, but a sign of spiritual disorder. The Old Testament frequently linked sickness with guilt or curse: the leper was considered ‘unclean’ (Lev 13:45–46); the blind or the lame were prevented from entering the Temple (2 Sam 5:8); and suffering was read as divine punishment.
Rabbinic literature reinforces this mentality. In the Talmud (Nedarim 41a) we read:
‘The sick person is like one who has lost everything; health is the greatest gift of God.’
And in Shabbat 55a:
‘There is no death without sin, nor suffering without iniquity.’
To be ill, therefore, was tantamount to being accursed and socially set apart. Healing, in turn, was not only biological restoration, but religious and social reintegration. When Jesus heals, He publicly blesses the one who was previously considered excluded from the covenant. Physical restoration becomes a visible sign of spiritual and communal restoration.
This understanding explains the public intensity of many miracles: the leper is sent to the priest ‘as a testimony to them’ (Mk 1:44); the paralytic is healed ‘in the sight of all’ (Lk 5:25–26); and the man born blind is restored to the worshipping community (Jn 9:7), among others.
Each healing is, therefore, a liturgical act of reconciliation, in which the ‘accursed’ is declared blessed. By healing, Christ subverts the prevailing theology of retribution: He shows that illness is not a punishment, but an occasion for the manifestation of God’s glory (Jn 9:3). The miracle ceases to be a display of power and becomes a rite of inclusion—a sacramental gesture that anticipates forgiveness.
Conclusion: the logic of the Incarnation
The deeds of Jesus reveal that God does not despise matter, but assumes and sanctifies it. Christ’s miracles are acts in which metaphysics becomes pastoral and the Incarnation is translated into a pedagogy of the senses: the Word made flesh touches creation and raises it to grace. From the Aristotelian-Thomistic viewpoint, Pure Act actualises the potencies of creation; from the Jewish viewpoint, the Messiah publicly restores the accursed, turning shame into blessing.
Thus, the gestures of Jesus—touching, breathing, washing and anointing—do not merely heal bodies: they reconstitute communion. The invisible becomes concrete, philosophy becomes flesh and history becomes sacrament.
As Saint Thomas writes:
‘The Saviour healed with gestures and words to show that, just as the Word became flesh, so too grace becomes visible in the flesh of the sacraments.’ (ST III, q.61, a.1, ad 3)
Principal sources
Saint Augustine, In Ioannis Evangelium Tractatus, 80.3.
Saint John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum, 25.2.
Saint Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, 32.1.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q.60–61.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books VII–IX; De Anima, II.1.
Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 35a; Shabbat 104b.
Philo of Alexandria, De Vita Mosis, II, 145–147.
Hugh of Saint Victor, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, I, 9.2.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q.60–65.
Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge, 1944.
Karl Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, vol. 4, ‘Der Christ als Ur-Sakrament’, 1960.
Yves Congar, Mystère du peuple de Dieu, 1953.