J L Austin's Sacramental Language

Its striking that J. L. Austin, the founder of speech act theory, used language borrowed from the sacraments when arguing that words actually do things.

Speaking of the need for words to be spoken and taken seriously if they are to be operative (e.g. name a ship or make a bet) he says:

… we are apt to have a feeling that their [the performative utterances] being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go on to believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is a description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance.

Criticising this way of thinking he argues rather that:

Thus ‘I promise…’ obliges me – puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle…. Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.

(How To Do Things With Words: the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962) ed. Urmoson, J. O. pp9-10)

Similarly:

… one thing that we must not suppose is that what is needed in addition to the saying of the words in such cases is the performance of some internal spiritual act, of which the words then are to be the report…. In the case of promising… it is very easy to think that the utterance is simply the outward and visible (that is, verbal) sign of the performance of some inward spiritual act of promising…. Now it is clear from this sort of example that, if we slip into thinking that such utterances are reports, true or false, of the performance of inward and spiritual acts, we open a loophole to perjurers and welshers and bigamists and so on, so that there are disadvantages in being excessively solemn in this way. It is better, perhaps, to stick to the old saying that our word is our bond.

(Philosophical Papers, second edition (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970) edited by J. Urmson and G. J. Warnock p223)

A speech act understanding of the sacraments might thus point towards an account of the objective aspect of the sacraments and their powerful efficacious nature that goes beyond mere memorialism and a focus on the private inner state of the individual communicant.