Is Jesus Physically Present in the Eucharist? Or How Not to Teach Berengarius

Abstract

In Catholic Eucharistic theology, an influential metanarrative claims that the Catholic Church mitigated its condemnation of Berengarius of Tours, frequently claiming St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent as evidence for such a mitigation. The authors of this metanarrative claim that Catholic teaching prohibits the “crass realism” of Christ being “physically” present in the Eucharist. This paper first argues that the authors of the metanarrative have misinterpreted their historical evidence, particularly regarding the entailments of Christ’s substantial presence in these sources. It then argues, on the strength of the encyclical Mysterium Fidei, that the semantic range of “physically” can cover the same meaning as “corporeally,” allowing Catholic theologians to say that Christ is physically present in the Eucharist, subject to the appropriate qualifications of the Ro-man Catechism and Mysterium Fidei about the non-local presence of Christ.

1. Introduction

Msgr. Kevin Irwin has articulated an influential narrative of the theology of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist from the ninth-century controversies through the Council of Trent (Irwin 2005). With this narrative particularly influential in the formation of priests, it has impacted high-profile teachers of eucharistic theology (Barron 2008). Unfortunately, this narrative improperly characterizes the judgements of the magisterium, particularly in response to the condemnation of Berengarius of Tours, and misinterprets the teachings of other figures like St. Thomas Aquinas.

One of the claims of Msgr. Irwin that is particularly limiting both to scholarly discourse and to popular teaching on the Eucharist is his claim that the term “physical presence” cannot be used to describe the Eucharist because he equates this term with the local and historical presence of Christ during his earthly life (Irwin 2005, p. 249). Through a substantive theological engagement of magisterial sources and a rereading of the Church’s response to the Berengarian controversy, I will argue that “physical presence” is a legitimate way of speaking about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and I will also ask whether it is permissible to state that Christ is “physically present” in the Eucharist, subject to all of the qualifications necessary from the Council of Trent and subsequent magisterium as makes up orthodox Catholic doctrine.

2. The Metanarrative

In treating eucharistic controversies of the medieval era under his “active presence” model of the Eucharist, Irwin states that:

the main theological issue relating to the Eucharist was the struggle to remain faithful to the orthodox faith by steering a course between “empty symbolism” and “gross realism” when it came to describing the Eucharist. By “empty symbolism” I mean to suggest that, since “symbol” had come to be regarded as less and less “real” by the ninth century, it was important to offer new terms that retained notions of sign, symbol, and sacrament, but expressed the fact that such terms were rich in content and the reality that they portrayed. By “gross realism” I mean to suggest that, while the Eucharist is always utterly real and is the fullness of Christ’s presence and action among us, one also needs to be careful lest one equate Eucharist with anything that is “physical” or localized or (only) “historical.”

Msgr. Irwin’s poles between “empty symbolism” and “gross realism” have important groundings in magisterial teachings and historical controversies, as we shall see, but his application of them to historical controversies, as we shall see, forces historical controversies into a swinging pendulum between the two extremes and distorts the magisterial teachings to which he alludes.

Irwin is not alone in his metanarrative of criticizing the initial foray of the ninth-century approach of St. Paschasius Radbertus as representing a “naive realism” or a “grossly carnal” understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. For the former, see Prusak (2014) and for the latter, see Barron (2008, p. 112) and Pohle (1911). The chief issue for critics of St. Paschasius is his identification of the consecrated host with the historical body of Jesus Christ, which “plainly none other than that which was born of Mary and suffered on the cross and rose again from the tomb.” (Radbertus 1852). As is well-traveled ground at this point in the literature, Ratramnus represents the opposite pole of an over-symbolization of the Eucharist, stressing the invisible substance over the body (see e.g., Ott 1911; Gatgounis 2021). Ratramnus is later taken up by Berengarius of Tours, who denies that the body of Christ is received by the mouth of communicants and who in turn is condemned twice by the Church and opposed by an influential Augustinian florilegium written by Lanfranc of Bec (Lanfranc of Canterbury 2009; Catellani 2013). In the metanarrative of these scholars, St. Thomas Aquinas also denies this naive realism, correcting the correction of the anti-Berengarian oaths, by stressing the sacramental and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist against the Berengarian over-the hyper-realism of the Paschasian-ecclesiastical pole (Irwin 2005, pp. 251, 255–56; Barron 2008, p. 119; Prusak 2014, pp. 247–49). Irwin holds that this interpretation of St. Thomas’s substantial/sacramental presence was taken up by the Council of Trent, keeping the golden mean between these extremes (Irwin 2005, pp. 250–56).

My purposes here are to reread the Church’s response to the Berengarian controversies about the presence of Christ to see whether they in fact come under the kind of condemnation these authors imply in their readings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and subsequent magisterium. From this new rereading of the actual teachings of the Church, Aquinas, and Trent, a new strain of the Church’s teaching arises that has been ignored by these authors, sometimes actively misinterpreting the text of Aquinas to justify this metanarrative. This strain, the “corporeal presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, continues consistently through Pope St Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei, which will then become a springboard to treat the language of “physical” presence in light of these qualifications.

Right at the outset, however, two important clarifications are in order. Firstly, as will become much clearer throughout the paper, especially when clarifying its usage in the post-Newtonian era, I will use “physical” and “physically” as nearly synonymous with “bodily,” “corporeal,” and “corporeally.” This will be subject to important qualifications regarding the wondrous Eucharistic presence of Christ, but importantly, “physical” and “physically” are not to be taken in the sense of “empirically detectable,” “subject to physical processes,” or “circumscribable in space,” because of the peculiar characteristics of the Eucharist, which will be treated in later sections.

Secondly, while I will argue that the “physical” presence of the Eucharist is a legitimate way to describe an aspect of the Eucharistic presence of Christ, the metanarrative is correct when it privileges the language of the Council of Trent in describing Jesus Christ as “really” and “substantially” present. I do not here dispute the real and substantial presence of Christ, nor do I dispute that the language of “real” and “substantial” are most appropriate to the Eucharist. What I am contending is that the metanarrative improperly excludes the language of “physical” presence from Catholic doctrine as correctly identifying an aspect of the Eucharistic presence of Christ. The language of “physical” presence is not a substitute for the language of “real” and “substantial,” but, as we shall see, the close connection between the corporeal presence of Christ and the language of “physical” presence is an important aspect of Catholic Eucharistic doctrine.

3. The Church’s Response to Berengarius

Of greater importance than the precise controversies between theologians are the Church’s response to them. Berengarious of Tours was condemned twice, with the oaths he was required to swear becoming important “monuments to tradition.” See Nichols (1991). The first anti-Berengarian oath of the 1059 Synod of Rome has drawn the most criticism from the above metanarrators as a capitulation to the “gross realism” of St. Paschasius:

I am in accord with the holy Roman Church and with the Apostolic See and with the mouth and heart profess concerning the sacrament of the lord’s table … that the bread and wine that are placed on the altar, after the consecration, are not only a sacrament, but also the true Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and that they are sensibly, not only in sacrament but in truth, touched and broken by the hands of priests and ground by the teeth of the faithful, swearing by the holy and consubstantial Trinity and by these most holy Gospels of Christ.1

Important for our purposes are the wording and intent of this oath. After consecration, what remains is “verum corpus et sanguinem Domini nostri Iesu Christi esse, et sensualiter, non solum sacramento, sed in veritate, manibus sacerdotum tractari et frangi et fidelium dentibus atteri.”2 The Synod insists that what happens to the Eucharist is happening sensibly and in truth, not merely in symbol/sacrament. It is truly and sensibly the Body of Christ which is tractari et frangi et atteri because this is sensibly happening to the sacred host. The sensualiter and in veritate in this oath clearly refers to the tractari et frangi and atteri rather than the esse. In other words, the sensualiter and in veritate refers to the what of the Eucharist, not the mode by which it is present. The Synod answers the question “what is being touched and broken by priests and ground by teeth?” with the answer “the Body of Christ,” sensibly and in truth. The fundamental thesis of this article is that the question of what the Eucharist is continues its clarifying role throughout the history of Catholic teaching on the matter, even if the mode by which it is present sometimes makes for confusion. What is in the priest’s hands and what is in the mouths of the faithful? The Body of Christ. What are the priests doing to what is in their hands? Touching and breaking it. What, then, are they touching and breaking? The Body of Christ.

While later eucharistic theology would clarify that the Body of Christ is no longer capable of injury or change because of the Ascension and therefore the mode by which it is present in the Eucharist is different than the mode by which it is present in heaven, nevertheless, fundamental Catholic teaching has not repudiated the claim of this first anti-Berengarian oath at the Synod of Rome 1059, as we will see. Because Berengarius denied the fundamental reality of the Eucharistic after the consecration as the Body of Christ, instead holding it to be only a sign, this oath is addressed to what the Eucharist is, that what is sensibly held, broken, and eaten is really the Body of Christ. Inasmuch as it does this, even if it lacks the sophistication and qualification of later teaching, it remains an accurate statement of what the Eucharist is.

The second anti-Berengarian oath, required by the 1079 Synod of Rome, changes the language somewhat, but does not either repudiate or contradict the language of 1059:

I, Berengar, in my heart believe and with my lips confess that through the mystery of the sacred prayer and the words of our Redeemer the bread and wine that are placed on the altar are substantially changed [substantialiter converti] into the true and proper living flesh and blood [veram et propriam et vivificatricem carnem et sanguinem] of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and that after consecration it is the true [esse verum] body and blood of Christ, that was born of the Virgin [quod natum est de Virgine] and that, offered [oblatum] for the salvation of the world, was suspended [perpendit] on the Cross and that sits [et quod sedet] at the right hand of the Father, and the true blood of Christ, which was poured out [effusus est] from his side not only through the sign and power of the sacrament, but in its proper nature and in the truth of its substance [sed in proprietate naturae et veritate substantiae].3

Some scholars have pointed to this second anti-Berengarian oath as offering some compromises to Berengarius from the first oath, but it uses similar language as St. Paschasius, which they criticize as conflating the historical Body of Christ with the resurrected Body of Christ (see Barron 2008, p. 118; Prusak 2014, p. 242). In particular, a phrase that the “gross realism” camp has criticized St. Paschasius for is that the Eucharist is “clearly none other than the flesh, which was born of the Mary and suffered on the cross and rose again from the tomb,” (non alia plane caro, quam quae nata est de Maria et passa in cruce et resurrexit de sepulchro) (Radbertus 1852; Criticisms in Irwin 2005, p. 248; Pohle 1911). The identification of the Eucharist with the Body and Blood of Christ, born of the Virgin, offered on the Cross for the salvation of the world, and sitting at the right hand of the Father makes it clear that the Synod is siding with St. Paschasius’s identification of the historical Body and Blood of Christ with the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ, and even the resurrected Body and Blood of Christ. While this second oath does remove the language of tractari, frangi and atteri, the identification of the historical, Eucharistic, and resurrected Jesus Christ as one Christ make it clear that the language of St. Paschasius is favored still.

The distinction between what the Eucharist is and the mode in which the Eucharist is can also be maintained in the use of the term “proper” in the second oath. The oath uses the word “proper” in a way that can defend this distinction in the substantial change into the “true and proper” flesh and blood of Christ and even the concluding phrase stressing the “proper nature and truth of substance” of the Eucharist. Again, while the Council of Trent will later make the distinction between the natural mode of Christ being in heaven and the sacramental mode of the Eucharist, the second anti-Berengarian Oath of 1079 stresses that the “what” of the Eucharist is Jesus Christ in “the propriety of nature and truth of substance.” This, I argue, is equivalent to the statements of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent (to be examined below) that the Eucharist is the “whole Christ.” While there can be a difference in consideration of the modes of presence between Christ resurrected in heaven and Christ in the Eucharist, there is only one Jesus Christ and it is illegitimate to make a distinction between what the Eucharist is and Jesus Christ in heaven.

4. St. Thomas Aquinas

One of the influential parts of the metanarrative is the claim that St. Thomas Aquinas’s Eucharistic theology repudiates the “gross realism” of St. Paschasius in favor of a substantial, sacramental presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. As a doctor of the Church and a theologian whose thought of the Eucharist is obviously influential on the Council of Trent, this reading of St. Thomas is of great importance for a Catholic theology of the Eucharist.

Bishop Robert Barron claims that Question 75 of the Summa Theologiae’s Tertia Pars contains an uneasiness with the first anti-Berengarian oath of 1059. Barron highlights the third objection and reply to article 1, where St. Thomas argues against the presence of Christ as in a place, to deploy the kind of compromise between the Berengarian and Paschasian positions set forth by the historical metanarrative of Irwin. Barron claims that Q. 75, art. 1, ad 3 makes a distinction between “Christ’s bodily presence ‘according to his proper species’ and that same bodily presence ‘according to a species appropriate to the sacrament,’” close to language used by St. Thomas in the reply to the second objection (Barron 2008, p. 118). Barron explains as follows:

“Proper species” is technical jargon for the ordinary appearance of something. Thus, in his proper species, Christ is an embodied person of a particular height, weight, and color, existing “in” heaven, though we’re not sure what this existence is like in a transcendent dimensional system. But this same embodied Christ can also become present according to a species, or appearance, that is alien to him, that is to say, according to a sacramental mode. In light of this distinction, Aquinas clarifies that the body of Christ is not in the sacrament of the Eucharist in the way a body is ordinarily in a place, measured by its own dimensions and circumscribed by the contours of the space it occupies. And thus, though we can say that Christ’s body is on various altars at the same time, we shouldn’t say that he is in various places at the same time, for this would be to confuse the proper and sacramental modes of appearance. In a similar vein, Aquinas specifies that we shouldn’t speak of carrying around the body of Christ when we process with the Eucharist or imprisoning Jesus when we put the sacramental elements in the tabernacle. To do so would be to conflate these two basic modes of presence. And this is why Thomas Aquinas and the mainstream of the Catholic tradition remain uneasy with that section of the anti-Berengarian oath that speaks of crunching Christ’s body with one’s teeth. In Aquinas’s more precise language, when one consumes the Eucharist, one crunches the accidents of the bread with the teeth, not the body of Christ, since Christ is being received substantially but according to his sacramental species, not his proper species.”

(Barron 2008, pp. 118–19. Emphasis in original)

Here, while Barron has an accurate description of species, he conflates it in several problematic ways with other correlated, but distinct categories of Eucharistic theology, namely, accidents, mode of presence, and locality.4 “Species,” as Barron notes, refers to the appearance of Christ. “Accidents,” however, are those characteristics which inhere in a substance but are not part of it essence, of which some are necessary and are not separable from the substance (Aquinas 1976, c. 2). These are crucial for this argument and St. Thomas’s doctrine of concomitance, for the necessary accidents of the body of Christ are always present when the substance of Christ’s body is present.

While Barron is correct regarding the difference between proper species and species of the sacrament, he over-applies it in ways that St. Thomas does not.5 In this sense, the proper species is not identical to the modes of presence. While there is a proper mode of presence of Christ in heaven and a sacramental mode of presence of Christ, there is also a mode presence of Christ that is concomitant with the sacramental presence of Christ, which St. Thomas even calls “natural concomitance.”6 Importantly, St. Thomas does not use the proper species/species of the sacrament distinction to deny the presence of Christ’s body as in a place in the passage cited by Barron (Q. 75, art. 1, ad 3), but instead states that:

The body of Christ is not in the sacrament in the same way [eo modo] as a body is in a place, with its dimensions commensurate with the place, but in a certain special mode, which is proper to this sacrament. Thence we do not understand Christ to be here only in sign, (that is sacramentally as it is in the genus of sign), but we understand the body of Christ to be here, as has been said, according to the mode proper [modum proprium] to the sacrament.7

It is the mode of presence that differs here between the proper way in which a body is in a place “that is, with its dimensions commensurate to the place,” which clearly is not the mode in which the body of Christ is in the eucharistic species, as St. Thomas will detail in Q. 76, art. 5. Of a chief concern of St. Thomas is not the proper species, but the mode in which the dimensionality of Christ is present. Since the dimensionality of the body of Christ in its heavenly mode is greater than that of the dimensions of each of the eucharistic species in space, it is clear that the dimensionality of the body of Christ is not present in its proper quantitative mode.8 St. Thomas states, nevertheless, that the entire dimensionality of Christ is present by concomitance to the substantial presence that the sacramental power effects; the power of the sacrament terminates at the whole substance of Christ and therefore all of the accidents intrinsic to the substance of Christ are concomitantly present in the Eucharist.9

Moreover, St. Thomas argues that the substance that is substantially present in transubstantiation is the proper terminus of the conversion in each act of the consecration: the body of Christ for the bread and the blood of Christ for the wine.10 The natural concomitance is not only of the entirety of the accidents of dimensionality, as just mentioned and will continue to be stressed below, but that by which the soul and divinity of Christ are present in the Eucharist.11 What is substantially present in the Eucharist is the body of Christ (and therefore concomitantly the whole Christ) and the blood of Christ (and therefore concomitantly the whole Christ). It is not the case that the whole Christ is the terminus of the transubstantiation, but the substance of the body and substance of the blood of Christ are the termini, by which the whole Christ is present concomitantly. The bodily substance of Christ and bloody substance of Christ, never separated from the whole Christ, are what is present in the Eucharist for St. Thomas, even though the mode of presence is not that ordinary, local, dimensionally commensurate way. The body- and blood-forward theology of St. Thomas should not be hidden by an appeal to “substance” as though he either denied accidents or as though substance was opposed to the kind of realism of St. Paschasius and the anti-Berengarian oaths. “Substance” and the “substantial presence” of Christ is, for St. Thomas, the presence of the body and blood of Christ.12

The concomitant accidents of Christ, as present in the Eucharist, are an important corrective to Barron’s statements and the metanarrative as a whole, which will be crucial to my overall argument. While St. Thomas is clear that the accidents of Christ are present by concomitance and particularly stresses that the dimensionality of the body of Christ is not present as in a place, commensurate to the dimensions of the place, it remains the case that the whole Christ, substance and all accidents which pertain to a full human body, is present in the Eucharist.

The accidents of Christ being present in the Eucharist for St. Thomas brings him much closer to the language of St. Paschasius than the metanarrative would suggest. In detailing that, indeed, the whole Christ is present in the Eucharist, substance and intrinsic accidents, St. Thomas holds that what is present is “not only the flesh, but the entire Body of Christ, that is bones and nerves and other things of this kind.”13 What is present and what is consumed is the entire body of Christ, with intrinsic accidents. Following the distinction in St. Paschasius and the anti-Berengarian oaths of 1059 and 1079, St. Thomas teaches that what is consumed is the entire body of Christ, but the mode in which it is present is not subject to the same constraints that the accidents of a body would be, because Christ’s dimensionality is not commensurate to the dimensions of the sacramental species, because Christ is not present as in a place, and because Christ’s body is no longer subject to change or passability.14

This last point is where St. Thomas directly engages the anti-Berengarian oath of 1059. In Article 6 of question 76, St. Thomas states that Christ has unfailing and incorruptible existence, which cannot be moved or changed, except accidentally inasmuch as he exists in the sacramental species.15 Building on this distinction between the impassible glorified body of Christ and the “breaking” and “crunching,” St. Thomas explicitly applies the language of the anti-Berengarian oath to the sacramental species rather than the proper species of the body of Christ.16 It is worth quoting the objection and reply in full:

[Obj. 3] Further, it seems that the breaking and the chewing are of the same thing. But the true body of Christ is that which is eaten, as John 6, “who eats my flesh and drinks my blood” Therefore the body of Christ is that which is broken and chewed. Thence in the confession of Berengarius it is said, “I consent to the Roman Church and with heart and mouth profess that the bread and wine which are placed on the later, after the consecration are the true body and blood of Christ, and in truth are touched by the hands of the priest, broken and torn by the teeth of the faithful.” Therefore the breaking should not be attributed to the sacramental species. …

Ad 3 it should be said that that which is eaten in its proper species itself is broken and chewed in its species. The body of Christ, however, is not eaten in its species, but in the species of the sacrament. Whence commenting on John 6, “the flesh pro does not profit anything,” Augustine says, “this is to be understood according to those who carnally understand the flesh; thus, they understood it in the mode (quo modo) that a cadaver is divided out, or as is sold from a butcher.” And thus, the body of Christ itself is not broken except according to the species of the sacrament. And in this mode, the confession of Berengarius is to be understood, as the breaking and the crushing of teeth refers to the sacramental species, under which the body of Christ truly is.”17

Here, St. Thomas’s preoccupation is with the impassibility of the body of Christ, not with the “gross realism” the metanarrative claims, as already shown with his insisting that the “bones and nerves” of Christ are present in the Eucharist. A very important detail is what St. Thomas does not provide an alternative reading for in the reply to objection: that “the body and blood of Christ are touched by the hands of the priest.” While breaking and crushing are terms that could have consequences for the impassibility of the body of Christ, the touching by the hands of the priest does not and therefore stands in no need of nuance. It is not the Paschasian realism of the Eucharist that St. Thomas is objecting to here, but a possible interpretation of the anti-Berengarian oath that would lead the faithful to believe that Christ receives further damage in the fraction and communion rites of the Mass. The proper, heavenly, impassible body of Christ is not eaten according to that proper species/appearance, but eaten according to its sacramental species/appearance, which Christ arranged so that it would be possible and fitting for us to consume him according to the appearances of normal food, instead of the horrible appearances of flesh and blood to eat.18 This sacramental species of Christ truly contains the whole Christ, concomitantly with the substance of his body: flesh, bones, nerves, soul, and divinity.19 Hence, what the priest touches with his hands is the whole Christ and what the faithful touch with their teeth is the whole Christ, not merely the accidents of bread and wine, but the substance, accidents which pertain to a whole human body, and concomitantly whole Christ. The teeth of the faithful do not tear Christ into strips of flesh nor does the priest break any bone of Christ’s body, but in the sacramental species, the body of Christ is per accidens moved, broken, and torn inasmuch as the sacramental species have been converted into Christ, but the body of Christ can never again be per se broken or torn because of the impassibility of the glorified and risen Christ.20

It is therefore inappropriate to divide the positions of the anti-Berengarian oath of 1059 and that of St. Thomas Aquinas based on bodily realism. Rather, St. Thomas clarifies the impassibility and concomitant nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

5. Other Magisterial Interventions and the Council of Trent

Several important mentions of the Eucharist are contemporary with St. Thomas Aquinas and will contribute to the thesis of this article, defending not just the “bodily,” but “physical” presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, most strongly stated in the magisterium of the Church by Pope St. Paul VI. The bull of Pope Urban IV, Transiturus de hoc mundo (1264), declaring the feast of Corpus Christi, mentions the “bodily presence/corporali praesentia” of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.21 Both the Sentences of Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas most frequently use “corporeal presence” to refer to the historical life of Christ that is no longer on Earth (most frequently in reference to the Ascension), but Transiturus uses it to refer to the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.22 This use of “corporeal presence” allows theologians to characterize the Eucharist this way, subject to the appropriate qualifications to be developed at and after Trent.

One of the major trends of the metanarrative, in avoiding the “crass realism” of their characterization of St. Paschasius’s position, is to introduce a strong distinction between the historical presence of Christ and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist (see e.g., Irwin 2005, p. 248; Prusak 2014, p. 242). Pope Clement VI and the Ecumenical Council of Constance declared that the body of Christ, after the consecration, is the same as the one which was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary and suffered on the cross, who is now seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven.23 Clement even calls it “numerically identical/idem numero” to the body that was born and suffered. The identity of the Eucharist with Jesus Christ is importantly supported here (the what of the Eucharist), even if the different modes of Christ in heaven and Christ in the Eucharist are defined most clearly with the Council of Trent.

Turning now to the Ecumenical Council of Trent, it is clear that its declarations on the Eucharist are magisterially normative and the most weighty intervention on this topic. Trent’s Decree on the Eucharist states:

The holy Synod teaches and clearly and simply professes that in the reviving sacrament of the holy Eucharist after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things. For this is not a contradiction among these things, that our Savior himself always sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven according to the mode of his natural existence, and nevertheless as sacramentally present to us in his substance in many other places. This way [ratione] of existing, which we can scarcely express with words, we must constantly believe to be possible for God and accept it by thought illumined by faith.24

Here, the Council makes the distinction between the natural mode (modum) of existence of Christ in heaven and the sacramental mode (ratione) of existence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is the same Jesus Christ in the sacramental presence as the natural mode of existence in heaven, i.e., glorified.25 An etymological complication will arise concerning this passage and the language of “physical presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, but it is enough here to note that Trent uses the language of “natural” mode of existence rather than the Lombardian “corporeal” presence to make the distinction between the mode of Christ existing in heaven and his existing in the Eucharist. The sacramental mode of Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist is not natural, but related to the “wondrous and singular conversion/mirabilem illam et singularem conversionem” of the elements into the “whole substance of the body and whole substance of the blood,” a presence that is beyond the natural, but yet that in which the body and blood of Christ are primary.26 The Council also confirms St. Thomas’s treatment of concomitance:

When he himself truly affirmed that it was his body, which he offered; and this faith has always been in the Church of God, that immediately after the consecration, the true body and blood of our Lord exists one with his soul and divinity under the species of bread and wine. The ody is under the species of bread and the blood under the species of wine from the power of the words, but the body is under the species of the wine and the blood under the species of the bread and the soul under each, by the power of the natural connection and concomitance, by which the parts of Christ the Lord, who is now risen from the dead and dies no more, are connected in himself, the divinity with the body and soul because of the admirable hypostatic union.27

The Council of Trent explicitly establishes the connection between the integral impassibility of Christ and the Resurrection as the justification for the real presence of Christ in his entirety under both species. The body of Christ cannot now be separated from the entire material aspect of Christ (i.e., blood, bones, nerves, viscera, etc.) as it cannot be separated from the soul and divinity of Christ.28

Present in the “Roman Catechism,” but not in the Decree on the Eucharist itself, is the clarification that Christ is present in the Eucharist, though “not as in a place/ut in loco non esse.”29 In this paragraph, the Catechism does in fact use the phrase “as a substance” to contrast the mode of bodies being in a place, but the paragraph does not do so in order to diminish the material nature of the Eucharist, but almost exclusively, as St. Thomas Aquinas did, to speak about the incommensurability of the dimensions of Christ in the Eucharist with respect to the space that the host takes up: use of ratio as opposed to truth

Then they [i.e., pastors] should teach that Christ the Lord is not in this sacrament as in a place; for place is a thing that follows upon things inasmuch as they are predicated with a certain magnitude. We do not speak of Christ the Lord being in the sacrament by this mode [ea ratione], as large or as small, which pertains to quantity, but as substance. For the substance of the bread is converted into the substance of Christ, not in magnitude or quantity. No one doubts that the substance of the air is contained in small space as well as large space; for the substance of the air is the full same nature in a small part of the air as in a large part of the air. So also it must be that the full nature of water is not less in a glass than it is in a river. When, therefore, the body of our Lord succeeds the substance of the bread, it is proper to confess that he is in the same mode in the sacrament as was the substance of the bread before the consecration; that whether it was under large or small quantities does not pertain to the reality at all.30

This passage shows that the limitation of the “realism” of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is not one that downplays the corporeal nature of the sacramental presence, but one that is concerned with the whole Christ not being commensurate with the dimensionality of the pre-consecrated host. The non-local nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is a denial of equality and commensurability in quantity, not a denial of the corporeal presence of Christ.

6. Taking Stock of the Metanarrative

Contrary to the implications of the metanarrative, the Church did not disavow the anti-Berengarian oaths of 1059 and 1079, as some compromise between the “naive realism” of the Paschasian position and the anti-realism of the Berengarian position. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and the Roman Catechism, concern themselves with one possible misinterpretation of the Paschasian approach and a host of metaphysical issues not raised by the metanarrative. As they address the possible misinterpretation, they insist on the impassibility of the Resurrected Christ, present in the Eucharist, and therefore that the “breaking” and “tearing” of the 1059 oath are those pertaining to the sacramental species only, not because Christ is not what is held by the priest, but because Christ can no longer suffer. The language of the Roman Catechism makes it clear that such breaking of the sacramental species serves to have the whole Christ present in each new piece, which the Catechism compares to air or water being fully present in each.

This stress of impassibility does not deny the “physical” or “historical” character of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, which Irwin or Barron would claim circumscribes Christ in the Eucharist. Rather, the Church consistently affirms the identity of the historical body of Christ (which was born of the Virgin Mary and suffered on the Cross) with Christ in his Eucharistic presence.31 The issues dealing with Christ’s non-local presence do not in any way deny the distinction between what is present in the Eucharist and the mode in which Christ is present. The questions of non-locality have to do with the empirical questions of dimensionality and measurement, which obviously do not remain the same. They do not undermine a miraculous realism in the Eucharistic presence of Christ, so long as the incommensurability of quantity and the impassibility of Christ are kept as appropriate Tridentine qualifications on such a presence.

Moreover, both St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope Urban IV affirmed the “bodily presence” of Christ as acceptable language to speak about the Eucharist, providing significant precedent for the major elaboration on this theme by Pope St. Paul VI. The qualifications offered by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent do not vindicate the metanarrative’s attempt to cast Catholic teaching as a via media between St. Paschasius and Berengarius, as the magisterial interventions consistently draw from and vindicate the Paschasian approach. For both doctrinal reasons mentioned here and pastoral reasons that will be elaborated below, insisting that Christ cannot be touched by the hands of the priest or received by the mouths of the faithful constitutes at best an idiosyncratic, overly restrictive reading of trends in premodern magisterial documents and at worst a subtle denial of the reality of Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist in favor of a reading of “substantially present” that hollows out the material implications of it. This latter position would do great damage to the lives of the Catholic faithful and similar, pseudo-Berengarian positions were addressed in Mysterium Fidei, to which I now turn.

7. Pope St. Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei

The most important document for my claim not only that the metanarrative mischaracterizes the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist, but that language about corporeality and even the “physical” presence of Christ in the Eucharist is legitimate for Catholic theologians, is Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical on the Eucharist Mysterium Fidei. Mysterium Fidei was an encyclical letter written in 1965, at least partially in order to address some Eucharistic theories arising from some Dutch and German theologians before and during the Second Vatican Council.32 In Mysterium Fidei, Pope St. Paul defends and elaborates upon Tridentine language of “transubstantiation” and “real presence” as the proper language for eucharistic theology. While the encyclical does much to contextualize the Eucharist within the sacrifice of the Mass, the operative paragraph for the controversy of this article is as follows:

To avoid any misunderstanding of this type of presence, which goes beyond the laws of nature and constitutes the greatest miracle of its kind, we have to listen with docility to the voice of the teaching and praying Church. Her voice, which constantly echoes the voice of Christ, assures us that the way in which Christ becomes present in this Sacrament is through the conversion of the whole substance of the bread into His body and of the whole substance of the wine into His blood, a unique and truly wonderful conversion that the Catholic Church fittingly and properly calls transubstantiation. As a result of transubstantiation, the species of bread and wine undoubtedly take on a new signification and a new finality, for they are no longer ordinary bread and wine but instead a sign of something sacred and a sign of spiritual food; but they take on this new signification, this new finality, precisely because they contain a new “reality” which we can rightly call ontological. For what now lies beneath the aforementioned species is not what was there before, but something completely different; and not just in the estimation of Church belief but in reality, since once the substance or nature of the bread and wine has been changed into the body and blood of Christ, nothing remains of the bread and the wine except for the species—beneath which Christ is present whole and entire in His physical “reality,”[totus et integer Christus adest in sua physica «realitate»] corporeally present [corporaliter praesens], although not in the manner [comodo] in which bodies are in a place.33

The new elaboration upon the Tridentine language in Mysterium Fidei centers upon not only the bodily presence of Christ, but also that Christ is corporeally present and uses the language of “physical ‘reality.’” Both of these formulations seem to be novel in the magisterial tradition, but, as shown above, corporaliter praesens is very close to the previously used language of corporali praesentia. Pope St. Paul does not hesitate to say that Christ is corporeally present, though within the boundaries of the Roman Catechism’s and St. Thomas Aquinas’s qualification of not in the manner of bodies in a place. What is most fascinating from the history of the magisterial teaching on the Eucharist is that the adverbial formulation seems to put the teaching not only in the category of what the Eucharist is, but indeed the mode of the presence. Pope St. Paul seems to be saying that Jesus Christ is corporeally present in the Eucharist, but that mode is qualified to be not in a place. If the Council of Trent taught that Jesus Christ is substantially present in the Eucharist, Pope St. Paul specifies that this substance is the substance of Christ’s body and so Jesus Christ is “corporeally” present because he is “substantially” present in the substance of his body.34 In using the language of “corporeally” present, Pope St. Paul is specifying Tridentine doctrine and in adding the qualification about the non-local presence, he is adding the metaphysical qualifications of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Roman Catechism to a higher level of magisterial teaching. These qualifications do not drive a wedge between the sacramental, substantial, real, and corporeal modes of presence of Christ in the Eucharist as if they were really distinct. Though miraculous, it is Jesus Christ present in the Eucharist, the same Jesus Christ that is in heaven (Pope St. Paul VI 1965, Mysterium Fidei, 20, 45.).

The second novel development of language requires some further elaboration, but deals with what is present in the Eucharist. The whole Christ is present “in his whole physical ‘reality’/in sua physica «realitate».” As shown above in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Roman Catechism, that everything proper to Christ’s human body is present in the Eucharist is not a new teaching and Pope St. Paul does not develop the teaching on this front. What Pope St. Paul adds is the new language of “physical” to describe what is present in the Eucharist. The use of the term “physical” is notable and deserves some discussion regarding the etymological origin and semantic breadth it has acquired.

Some might take issue with Pope St. Paul’s use of the word “physical” here as in tension with the categories described by the Council of Trent. “Physical” derives from the Greek physikē, meaning that which pertains to a physis, which Latin translates as “natura.” On etymological grounds, then, it seems that Pope St. Paul is stating that Jesus Christ is present in his entire “natural ‘reality.’” While this is not necessarily contradictory to the Tridentine teaching that Christ is at the right hand of the Father in his “mode of natural existence,” it does complicate the question as to whether the proper natural presence of Christ is in the Eucharist.

Whatever the answer to that question, this etymological connection of “physical” to physis is not the sense in which Pope St. Paul intends it when he speaks in the mid-twentieth century. Importantly, it is also not the sense in which the faithful would understand it then or today. While physis was the foundation of premodern Aristotelian physics, the new field of physics coming into its own in the seventeenth century changed the semantic scope of “physical.” When premodern, Aristotelian physics dealt with natures as the principle of motion and rest, this objection would have made sense, but mathematical physics changed the focus of physics to what the premodern tradition would have called the motions of bodies. The abandonment of natures in favor of the mathematical description of the motion of bodies and the different forces that act upon them changed the dominant understanding of physics as a field. Even more than the empiricist foundations of the contemporary sciences with their emphasis on observation and replication, the narrowing of scope to the actions of bodies and the forces upon them changed the imaginative world described by physics from natural internal principles of action to inert bodies acted upon by external forces (Newton 1687; Funkenstein 1986; Wallace 1984). This change in physics led to the change in the semantic extent of the word “physical,” which both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary state as pertaining to bodies and material objects.35 Merriam-Webster even lists “corporeal” as a synonym for “physical.”

While dictionary definitions (especially for texts not originally written in English) are certainly not binding on technical theological usage, the semantic shift in the term “physical” through the scientific revolution makes the case for the theological use of the new semantic breadth of “physical” to include not only those things pertaining to metaphysical natures, but also those things pertaining to bodies. It is clearly this new sense as pertaining to bodily reality, which entered the common parlance as a synonym for “corporeal,” in which Pope St. Paul is using “physical” and not as pertaining to metaphysical natures. In this sense, it does seem as though Pope St. Paul is introducing “physical” as a synonym for “material” and “corporeal,” as the standard post-scientific revolution meaning of the word has it.

Does this mean that the theologian is justified for using “physical” as a synonym for the much more technical “corporeal” that is used to identify the reality of Christ’s presence by medieval and Tridentine texts? I submit that the answer is yes. The way in which “physical” is used by Pope St. Paul and the semantic shift to bodily reality does permit at least twentieth-century and later theologians to use “physical” to describe the Eucharist in much the same way that the documents use “corporeal,” subject the same qualifications about the non-local and incommensurability of dimensionality that St. Thomas and the Roman Catechism assert. Here, the theologian would refer only to the semantic ranges of “physical” that pertain to the bodily and material and not to those semantic ranges that would imply that the Eucharist obeys the laws of physics, which it clearly does not, due to those previous qualifications.

If this is the case, then the theologian can go one step beyond the language given by Pope St. Paul. If “physical” is synonymous with “corporeal” for theological purposes, given the semantic shift in “physical,” then “physically” can be synonymous with “corporeally.” Since Pope St. Paul states that Christ is “corporeally present” in the Eucharist, we could say that Christ is “physically present” in the Eucharist intending exactly and only the same semantic extent present in “physically” as “corporeally,” also intending this to describe the mode of presence rather than merely what is present.

If theologians are not comfortable establishing the exact equivalence beyond the language stated in Mysterium Fidei, then there is another way in which one can preserve the language of “physically” present, at least in English, while preserving the adjectival meaning in Latin and restricting it to only what is present in the Eucharist. In Latin, both adverbial and adjectival uses of words can be in adjectival forms and cases. An adjective in the ablative case, therefore, can be translated both adjectivally and adverbially, depending on intent and context. “Physica” could thereby be translated both “physical” and “physically” without there being a “physicaliter” in the text.

Moreover, English has no way of speaking about adjectives themselves without using adverbs. To speak about what it means to be physical, English specifies this category of adjectival discourse by using the word “physically.” We can speak about Christ’s physical presence in the Eucharist when adjectivally qualifying the presence, but when speaking about the quality itself, English speakers say that Christ is present in the Eucharist physically, even when describing the adjectival usage. So even when not attempting to speak about the mode of presence and restricting strictly to describing the language of Pope St. Paul, English-speaking theologians can properly say that Christ is in the Eucharist physically, subject to all of the qualifications Pope St. Paul places on this presence from St. Thomas and the Roman Catechism.

8. Pastoral Applications of Eucharistic Language

While a seemingly abstruse philosophical qualification, the language of the metanarrative can cause significant distress to the Catholic faithful. If, out of some deference to Berengarius that the magisterium has never shown, the Catholic faithful are told that Christ is not physically present in the Eucharist or that they do not receive Christ in their mouths or touch him with their hands, this can easily lead them to believe that Jesus Christ is not corporeally and materially present in the Eucharist. While it is certainly the case that Christ is not merely physically, corporeally, or materially present in the Eucharist and that the Real Presence is much more than this, a denial of the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist makes it difficult to accurately convey the teachings of the Council of Trent that the substances that are present is the body and blood of Christ and everything that pertains to a proper human body. With an eye towards pastoral applications of teaching, language of physicality would be of immense usefulness to speak to lay faithful about the Eucharist to stress this material and corporeal presence of Christ in intuitive and clear ways. While the proponents of the metanarrative prefer to keep to the language that Christ is “substantially present” in the Eucharist, this obscures the teaching that this substance is the substance of the body of Christ; hence, Mysterium Fidei introduces the language of “corporeally present” and “physical” presence.

I have argued here that this influential metanarrative significantly distorts historical statements of the magisterium to imply that the Church gives ground to Berengarian teaching as a sort of via media between St. Paschasius and Berengarius and to imply that “physical” presence is not an acceptable Catholic theological description of Christ in the Eucharist. Both the historical record and Mysterium Fidei show this to be an exaggeration. This exaggeration, however, carries significant danger of obscuring the unambiguous teaching of Mysterium Fidei that Christ is corporeally present in the Eucharist in his entire physical ‘reality.’

Moreover, without allowing the language of Christ being “physically” present in the Eucharist (always subject to the appropriate qualifications), there is a great risk that the Catholic faithful (who, in the United States, already doubt the Real Presence at an alarming rate) will miss the import of the substantial and corporeal presence of the Lord and will believe that the Church teaches some version of Berengarianism, where the Eucharist is not materially Jesus Christ, but only “substantially,” a term not explained by the metanarrative as being both material and formal, in danger of being interpreted as only a presence spiritually and symbolically. So, while the denial of the language of “physically present” is not necessarily precluded by the language of Mysterium Fidei, it carries with it a major risk of opacity that is avoided in “physical” and “physically” present.

It is hoped that this study particularly contributes to correcting this metanarrative in how faculty teach the Berengarian and Pre-Tridentine controversies about the Eucharist, the source and summit of the Catholic faith.