Abstract
Twenty-five years ago, Germain Grisez introduced a significant alternative to the Scholastic account of transubstantiation in terms of substance and accidents, and in particular to Aquinas’s version thereof. Although Grisez’s specific proposal fails, it exemplifies a broader type of account on which bread and wine are transformed into Christ insofar as, through this transformation, the person of Christ comes to incorporate a new sort of bodily reality. Grisez himself proposed that bread and wine are transformed into new parts of Christ’s natural body. Although his Thomistic critics have good reason to reject this proposal, they fail to disarm his objections to the Thomistic account. In contrast with both, I suggest that the Eucharist can be fruitfully understood as a divinely authoritative, metaphysically robust extension of the Incarnation from the realm of nature to that of culture, on the model of hypostatic union. So understood, it reveals the true meaning of culture by inserting into the heart of human culture an act of cultural creativity—in the mode of self-gift rather than self-assertion—that transcends the capacity of any merely human maker in such a way as to verify the doctrine of transubstantiation. This account presupposes the pervasive role of human making, and therefore of culture, in the constitution of the world. It also, however, presupposes the reality of the natural and moral orders as distinct from the cultural, and the complete dominion of the suffering and risen Christ over His own body, the goods of the earth, and all human culture.
1. Introduction
Twenty-five years ago, Germain Grisez published a response to Aquinas’s account of transubstantiation (Grisez 2000, pp. 111–31). He seems to have written as a matter of personal piety, to work his way out of a keenly felt difficulty. I have chosen Grisez as my starting point not only because I find something worth saving in his alternative to Aquinas—or rather, in his alternative to the standard scholastic account, of which St. Thomas articulated one version—but also because I have faced the same difficulty. Like Grisez, I fear that the role of the accidents of bread and wine in the scholastic account is deeply problematic for metaphysics. Like Grisez, moreover, I will sketch an alternative on which Christ is substantially present in the Eucharist through a new extension of the mystery of His person into the world. Unlike Grisez, however, I will do so by presenting the Eucharist—an essentially liturgical, sacramental reality—in terms of a supernatural transformation and elevation of human culture within the Church.
By the end of this essay, I hope to have made it plausible that the common scholastic account mislocates the mystery of the bread of life, insofar as it does not explicate Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist in terms of a specifically cultural mode of being. Yet I also hope to have made it plausible that standard attempts to present the Eucharist in cultural terms fail to account for the complete sovereignty of Christ over human culture. Such is this sovereignty that a Eucharist understood in terms of culture can also be understood in terms of hypostatic union, as a cultural analogue and extension of the Incarnation. In this way, a cultural account of the Eucharist can yield not an alternative to but rather a deeper understanding of the metaphysical doctrine of transubstantiation. The Eucharist can then serve as a divinely authoritative, divinely effective model of the cultural construction of meaning, and therefore of being.
The theological possibility that I have just sketched is counterintuitive. I have deliberately stated it in bald, provocative terms, so as not to minimize the difficulties it presents. Before beginning in earnest, then, I want to clarify how I take the account developed below to be related to metaphysics, to theological orthodoxy, and to Thomism.
Cultural accounts of the Eucharist tend to be proposed—and are therefore likely to be received—as alternatives to the metaphysical approach that gave us the term “transubstantiation.” One might want to abandon the latter approach because one takes transubstantiation to be metaphysically impossible, or because one no longer wishes to think metaphysically at all. Either way, the turn to culture often involves a decision to understand the Eucharist in terms of meaning—hence the term “transignification”—rather than in terms of being. This alternative, I submit, is based on a faulty distinction, for culture itself is real. It exists, and it is subject to ontological analysis. The possibility in which I am interested is both cultural and metaphysical; it turns on a distinction not between culture and being, but between culture and nature—both of which must find a place in any adequate metaphysics, and for that matter in any adequate account of the Eucharist. I mean to propose for consideration a thoroughly metaphysical account, which I hope will be received and assessed as such.
In referring not only to culture but to cultural construction, I do not intend to capitulate to the view that human beings do or can create meaning, much less being, independently of any objective truth or goodness. Rather, I will suggest that the Eucharist simultaneously explodes this destructive vision and retrieves the reality of which it is a distortion. We confer true meaning on the realities that make up our lives—and thereby also confer on them a new depth and richness of being, properly called “cultural”—only to the extent that we conform ourselves to the self-emptying love revealed in the body of Christ, blessed, broken, and given. I intend this too as an ontological thesis, which will turn out to involve the decisive role of an objective moral order, rooted in God’s creative love, in the ontology of culture.
One reason for insisting on metaphysics in an account of the Eucharist is that one is in love with the Lord Jesus, and thinks that finding a way to extend to all His disciples a life-giving, bodily union with himself is just the sort of thing He would have done (ST III, q. 75, a. 1 c.). Another reason, however, is a conviction that the rule of Christian faith can never be found apart from the unity of the Church, and that this unity, which is always in any case obscured by our sins, cannot be maintained without the authoritative service rendered to it by the successors of the apostles in general, and of Peter in particular. As a Roman Catholic, I share this conviction with both Aquinas and Grisez. I therefore aim to sketch an account of the Eucharist that is orthodox, in the sense of being a theological opinion (doxa) that is right or straight (orthē) insofar as it conforms to the rule of faith, so understood. Whether I succeed in this aim is, in the end, not mine to judge.
In conversations concerning St. Thomas, I have occasionally been told that I am missing the deeper meaning of some of his most profound metaphysical views—in particular, his insistence that the essential differences of even the most familiar substances are unknown to us as a matter of principle.1 This is possible, and I should be happy to find that I agree with Brother Thomas after all, whether on the central claim of this essay or on one or another subsidiary point. I am not yet convinced, however, and even if I have indeed missed something, I do not see that the deeper insights in question are always well understood, or that sufficient work has been done to bring them to bear on Aquinas’s account of transubstantiation. Still, if one effect of this essay is to evoke from others articulations of Thomas’s Eucharistic theology that better reveal its depth and meaning, the essay will have been worth the effort.
In fact, I consider myself a Thomist in a number of crucial respects. To begin with, Aquinas’s Eucharistic theology goes well beyond his account of transubstantiation. It is a rich, insightful theology of sacrament and sacrifice, at the heart of which is the real, true, and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Although no theological account can exhaust the mystery of faith, I have no wish to diverge from Aquinas’s broader discussion, much less his insistence on Christ’s substantial presence. In metaphysics, I affirm Thomas’s distinction between esse and essentia, I am deeply convinced of the analogical character of being, and I cannot imagine a metaphysics worth having that does not include, for example, suitably nuanced versions of the distinctions between substance and accidents and between matter and form. Such points of agreement can be multiplied.
When it comes to detailed exegetical work, I admit, my greatest love is not Aquinas but Aristotle. In method, I tend to prefer an Aristotelianism that gives itself over to the methods and insights of natural science and of phenomenology just as deeply as the scholastic tradition gave itself over to the logical dimension of Aristotle’s approach. On the logical front—which is, of course, indispensable—I prefer both an Aristotelianism and a Thomism that recognize demonstration as the ideal fruit of inquiry, but dialectic as its lifeblood.
The following is a dialectical essay, and not—even in aspiration—a demonstrative one. I will provide as much context as a I can, but in these few pages I cannot sketch, much less defend on every front, the complete metaphysical context within which the theological possibility to be broached might come into its own. On the contrary, I am trying to determine whether this metaphysical context might be worth developing further, for one who prefers faith in the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist to any particular understanding of the metaphysics that might be involved. In the following pages, faith in the Eucharist is a locked gateway to metaphysical reflection, and the integrity of the lock is essential. If the gate cannot be opened without smashing the lock, I have no wish to continue.
2. Aquinas on Transubstantiation
2.1. Theology and Intelligibility
In its basic outline, the scholastic account of transubstantiation in terms of substance and accidents is well known. Rather than offering a general overview, therefore, I will begin with Grisez’s critique of Aquinas. Grisez’s concerns will lead us to a selective discussion of Aquinas himself, as an authoritative exponent of the scholastic account.
Grisez finds in Thomas’s discussion of transubstantiation a number of interconnected difficulties, which he then reduces to two central worries. His first worry arises from the claim that after the consecration, the accidents of bread and wine continue to exist without inhering in any substance. According to Grisez, Aquinas fails to render intelligible the theological claim that Christ’s body and blood are contained under the accidents of bread and wine, given that the accidents themselves are attributes neither of Christ nor of anything else. As a result, Aquinas also fails to render intelligible the doctrinal claim that Christ is really, truly, and substantially present in the Eucharist, and that in receiving the Eucharist we eat and drink His body and blood (Grisez 2000, pp. 113–18, 121).2 Grisez’s second worry is that Aquinas fails to draw an intelligible distinction between the conversion of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood and the mere annihilation and replacement of the former by the latter. Thomas thus fails to render intelligible the doctrine that transubstantiation is a true conversion, in which bread and wine play an essential, constitutive role as the starting points of a genuine change (pp. 118–20, 121).3
Grisez thus argues that Aquinas fails to render intelligible two of his most important theological claims about the Eucharist: that Christ’s body and blood are contained under the accidents of bread and wine, and that transubstantiation is a genuine conversion. In both cases, Grisez claims not only that Aquinas’s account is incorrect, but also that it is inappropriately unintelligible, and so untheological. Although I think there are good reasons to agree that the account of Christ’s presence in terms of substance and accident is incorrect, I will begin by defending it against the charge that it is untheological. If we read Aquinas on his own terms, I will argue, we find that his goal is not to make the Eucharist comprehensible, but to continue into the realm of sacramental theology the analogical and apophatic mode of discourse proper to human speech concerning God. In coming to recognize this, we will also have occasion to clarify our understanding of Aquinas’s specific proposals.
In making the case that Aquinas’s account is unintelligible, Grisez focuses on the use of language:
Would Aquinas himself accept this requirement? To be sure, he invariably defines his terms as clearly as he can manage—or, at least, as clearly as he thinks his readers can manage in a given context. Still, it is far from clear that he thinks himself required to invest with a new, definite meaning every theological term that has been in some way emptied of its usual meaning. In speaking of God, he explains, we employ the usual meanings of our terms as pointers to a reality that remains in itself unknown. We have good reason to adopt this analogical mode of speaking, for we have good reason (via the “way of causation”) to affirm between creatures and God a likeness that we can further define only by sharply distinguishing its two terms (via the “way of preeminence and negation”) (ST I, q. 13, esp. aa. 1, 3–5).4Since theology proposes to provide understanding, acceptable theology not only must be consistent with faith but intelligible. An account is intelligible only if it is a logically coherent set of propositions expressed in statements whose terms have definite meanings. But Aquinas’s theology of Jesus’ substantial presence in the Eucharist avoids incoherence only by evacuating key terms of their usual meanings. And he does not supply them with other, definite meanings. So, it seems to me that his account fails to meet the requirement of intelligibility.(Grisez 2000, p. 113)
This analogical, apophatic approach to speech concerning God informs Thomas’s approach to speech concerning the Eucharist. On the one hand, he argues, it is a matter of faith that the body of Christ is in the Eucharist truly, not just figuratively, and also that the substance of bread and wine does not persist in the Eucharist after the consecration (ST III, q. 75, a. 1 c., a. 2 c.). On the other, it is apparent to the senses that the accidents of bread and wine do persist after the consecration (q. 75, a. 5). Faced with this tension, we can at least recognize that it is possible for both premises to be true. The substance on which the accidents of bread and wine previously depended was only their secondary cause; and God, as primary cause, can produce without a given secondary cause anything he can produce through it (q. 75, a. 5 ad 1; q. 77, a. 1 c.). In Thomas’s doctrine of analogy, moreover, univocity fails precisely when God enters the picture as first cause. In attributing the persistence of the accidents to the action of the first cause alone, Thomas expresses his conviction that this effect surpasses our understanding in a way similar to that in which the act of creation itself surpasses our understanding.
We find this same conviction in his account of the Eucharistic conversion. Having asked whether it is possible for bread to be converted into Christ’s body, he responds in the first place not with metaphysics but with the witness of the Fathers, who attribute this conversion to the power of God alone. He then adds that because God is infinite act, His action extends to the entire nature of a being (totam naturam entis), so that He can convert the entire substance of one being into the entire substance of another: form into form, matter into matter. Because, that is, the nature of a being is common (communis natura entis) to both forms, and similarly to both matters, “the author of being can convert whatever there is of beingness in the one into that which there is of beingness in the other, removing that by which it was distinguish from the former” (ST III, q. 75, a. 4 c. and ad 3).
In his response to Grisez, Stephen Brock shows that Thomas’s appeal to the “common nature of a being” does not make transubstantiation a conversion in the sense in which natural changes are conversions (Brock 2001, pp. 545–59). As Aquinas’s general account of universals should lead us to expect, the “nature of a being” common to the two forms, or to the two matters, is one in ratio rather than in number (ST III, q. 75, a. 8 c.).5 Rather than the persistence of a numerically identical substrate, then, Aquinas is describing an orderly succession of closely matched substantial principles under the accidents of bread and wine, where only those accidents are numerically identical before and after the consecration.6 An effect of divine power alone, outside the natural order, the Eucharistic conversion is no more a conversion in the ordinary sense than divine causation in general is causation in the ordinary sense (Brock 2001, pp. 554–55). Later in the same question, in fact, Aquinas himself emphasizes our lack of understanding:
In this conversion, several things are more difficult than in creation. In creation, the only difficulty is that something comes to be from nothing; but that pertains to the mode of production proper to the first cause, which presupposes no other thing. In this conversion, though, there is not only the difficulty that the entirety of one thing [hoc totum] is converted into the entirety of another, in such a way that nothing of the former persists—something that does not pertain to the usual mode of production of any cause. In addition, there is the difficulty that the accidents persist after the substance has been corrupted, and many others, to be discussed in what follows.(ST III, q. 75, a. 8 ad 3)
This account of the Eucharist by analogy and negation continues in the language with which Thomas describes the relation between the accidents of bread and wine and the body of Christ. The substance of bread, he has argued, is converted into the substance of Christ’s body. It is clear to the senses, moreover, that the accidents of bread persist in the sacrament, beginning with its spatial dimensions, and that the body of Christ is not present in the sacrament through its own spatial dimensions. Christ’s body, then, is present on the altar by means of the spatial dimensions of bread (ST III, q. 75, a. 5; q. 77, a. 3; q. 76, a. 5 c.). Like the substance of bread before the consecration, the substance of Christ’s body is present under the accidents of bread; the result is a likeness rendered analogical by a crucial difference:
The body of Christ is not in this sacrament as in a place, but in the manner of a substance, that is, the manner in which a substance is contained by dimensions. For in this sacrament, the substance of Christ’s body succeeds the substance of bread; and so, just as the substance of bread was not under its own dimensions locally, but in the manner of a substance, so neither is the substance of Christ’s body. The substance of Christ’s body is not, however, the subject of those dimensions, as was the substance of bread. That is why the bread, because of its own dimensions, was there as occupying a place—because it was fitted [comparabatur] to that place by means of its proper dimensions. The substance of Christ’s body, however, is fitted to the same place by means of the dimensions of something else, in such a way that the reverse is true: the proper dimensions of Christ’s body are fitted to the place by means of its substance.(ST III, q. 76, a. 5 c.; cf. a. 1 ad 3; q. 78, a. 5 c. and ad 2)
Aquinas’s account of the Eucharist contains, I believe, a number of important metaphysical insights. Among these is the notion of being present in the manner of a substance, to which we shall return. On the whole, however, it seems to me that Thomas is not trying to meet Grisez’s requirement of intelligibility. That is, he is not trying to give a definite meaning to the terms “conversion” and “contained under,” as these are used in the statements “The substance of bread is converted into the substance of Christ’s body,” and “The body of Christ is contained under the accidents of bread.” Instead, he affirms that the first cause can bring about the conversion of the substance of bread and wine, and the persistence of their accidents, because he thinks it follows straightforwardly from the real presence of Christ that the first cause has, in point of fact, worked these miracles. Then, through a careful comparison with ordinary changes and with substances that are present in the ordinary way, he seeks words that will betray neither the Eucharistic mystery nor sound philosophy. The result is an analogical account in which, as in all theological discourse, the infinite term is known only to the extent that the finite term bears some limited likeness toward it.
This reading of Aquinas’s theological intentions is shared by Brock, who to my knowledge has offered the most detailed response to Grisez. In Brock’s subtle, insightful analysis, we see how Aquinas approaches the question concerning conversion on a number of distinct fronts. First, the language of conversion presupposes a temporal sequence of closely matched realities, the substance of bread and the substance of Christ’s body. This sequence links the two substances so closely that we find ourselves thinking of them together under a common predicate: “that which is contained under the accidents of bread and wine.” Second, the persistence of the accidents allows us to think of this sequence or succession as a conversion: bread is converted into Christ’s body insofar as the “contents” of the accidents, the “substance contained under them,” is first one substance and then the other. Finally, we can speak fittingly of a conversion insofar as the words of consecration get their purchase on the world through the substance of bread, the pre-existence of which is therefore essential to Christ’s presence: “This,” namely the substance contained under the accidents of bread, “is,” beginning now, “my Body” (Brock 2001, pp. 559–63).
None of this, however, constitutes a metaphysical explanation of transubstantiation. As the role of the words of consecration reminds us, in fact, the Eucharistic conversion is essentially a sacramental conversion, brought about by the words of the first cause alone. As Brock puts it,
Brock’s response to Grisez thus involves on the one hand a careful analysis of the reasons Aquinas finds for speaking analogically of a conversion, and on the other a frank recognition that we do not, and indeed cannot, really understand the reality of which we are speaking. Both sides of this response are thoroughly and convincingly grounded in the Thomistic texts.The foregoing discussion makes no pretense of fully explaining transubstantiation. It does not display the nature of the power by which the change is accomplished. It only shows that it can make sense to speak of the conversion of one whole substance into another. The analogy between “the substance under the accidents” and the subject of a transformation saves the language of conversion. But fully explaining the event would require understanding the form and power of the truth of the Word of God. It would be like fully explaining creation. …If the foregoing interpretation is correct, Thomas’s conception of transubstantiation is formed strictly in light of its supernatural proximate cause: a human utterance of the Word incarnate. If we prescinded from the cause, the metaphysical analysis would be idle. The analogy between “the substance under the accidents” and a subject of transformation would seem merely irrelevant. We would indeed find it unintelligible to speak of transubstantiation as a conversion. But of course this is hardly an objection. It only means that for all the philosophy involved, Thomas’s doctrine of the Eucharistic conversion is quite formally theological.(Brock 2001, p. 565)
2.2. Substance as a Metaphysical Posit
Brock’s essay focuses exclusively on the question of conversion, that is, on transubstantiation. If we are willing to accept this limitation, his defense of Aquinas is remarkably successful. If, however, we take a step back, further questions present themselves. In explaining the focus of his essay, Brock allows that the most controversial aspect of Aquinas’s view is the claim that the accidents of bread and wine subsist in the Eucharist without a subject, and that Christ is substantially contained under these accidents. He nevertheless suggests that the question of transubstantiation should be discussed first, given that “in all of Thomas’s systematic treatments of the sacrament, the discussion of transubstantiation precedes and determines his positions on the other matters” (Brock 2001, p. 530n3). I am not sure, however, that this is quite correct, and as a result I am not sure that Brock’s approach, successful as it is on its own terms, does not depend in part on a questionable assumption.
It is of course true that in the Summa theologiae, on which I will focus here, the question on the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (q. 75) comes before the question on the manner in which Christ exists in the sacrament (q. 76) and the question on the accidents that remain in the sacrament (q. 77). Within question 75, however, Aquinas develops his account of the conversion only gradually, as a consequence of faith in the literal truth of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Although the development is not completely linear, its main line runs from the truth of Christ’s presence (a. 1) to the notion of conversion (a. 4) only by way of the preliminary conclusions that the substance of bread and of wine neither persists in the sacrament (a. 2) nor is annihilated (a. 3).
When Aquinas then introduces the persistence of the accidents (a. 5), he does not introduce it as a consequence of the notion of conversion. In fact, there is an important sense in which he gives no argument for it at all. Having offered four philosophically grounded objections—and a sed contra that, it is worth noting, does not use the term accidens but only species—he simply remarks that the persistence of all the accidents of bread and wine is obvious to the senses. In the remainder of the brief corpus, he restricts himself to explaining why it was reasonable for God to arrange things in this way. Brock himself, we have seen, recognizes that the persistence of the accidents does not follow from, but is presupposed by, Aquinas’s full account of the sacramental conversion.
Within question 75, then, the truth of Christ’s bodily presence and the persistence of the accidents are ultimate first principles, the former being a matter of faith and the latter of direct experience. That the substance of bread and wine does not persist follows from the truth of Christ’s presence, and the full account of the sacramental conversion presupposes both that these substances do not persist and that their accidents do. Correspondingly, the first and more important of Grisez’s two central worries has to do not with the Eucharistic conversion but with the persistence of the accidents—and, above all, with the assertion that the substance of one thing can be contained under the accidents proper to another.
This is the worry on which I want to focus. Grant that Aquinas’s use of language in discussing the Eucharist is theologically appropriate, and that it is consistent with his understanding of theological language in general. Grant too that if we accept that Christ is substantially contained under the subsistent accidents of bread and wine, we should also accept Aquinas’s account of the Eucharistic conversion. Still, Aquinas’s basic claim about how Christ is present may turn out to be problematic. I think that it is indeed problematic, not because it fails to provide a definite account of the supernatural—which in any case lies beyond our comprehension—but rather because it distorts our understanding of the natural order, in ways that have since proven to be deeply harmful.
Aquinas accepts roughly the following four claims. First, in speaking of corporeal substances insofar as they are corporeal, the terms species “appearance” and accidentia “accidents” are roughly interchangeable. Thus he writes both that the objects of sensation in the Eucharist are the species of bread and wine, and that it is apparent to sensation that all the accidents of bread and wine persist in the Eucharist (ST III, q. 72, a. 1 obj. 2 and ad 2; q. 75, a. 5 c.). Similarly, the species of bread and wine that remain in the Eucharist are sufficient for the sacramental sign, “for the ratio of a substance is known through its accidents” (q. 75, a. 2 ad 3).
Second, the accidents thus identified with the species of a corporeal substance are not only those that we would ordinarily call appearances. In particular, they include all the causal powers that had previously belonged to the substance of bread or of wine. Indeed, the action of these accidents on other substances is attributed to them not only as accidents, but also as species (ST III, q. 77, a. 3). The causal powers of a corporeal substance, it seems, are essential to its outward presence in the world; hence they belong to its appearance, in a broad but important sense.
Third, all the accidents of a corporeal substance—or, equivalently, its complete appearance or outward presence in the world—are metaphysically separable from the substance itself, at least by divine power. Dimensive quantity is then the ultimate metaphysical subject of the other accidents, which presumably retain their other usual interconnections as well.7 As we have seen, Aquinas finds this claim extraordinarily difficult, even while he accepts it as required by faith in the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Fourth, the priority of a substance to its accidents involves something like efficient causation. As first cause, God ordinarily confers being on accidents by means of a secondary cause, which in each case is the substance to which they belong. However, He need not do so, and in the Eucharist “it is given to the sacramental species, by divine power, that they remain in their own being, which they had while the substance of bread and wine existed” (ST III, q. 77, a. 3 c.).
Putting all this together, we find that Aquinas holds the following. In the case of corporeal substances, at least, the distinction between substance and accidents involves two terms: substance, and an orderly network of accidents. These two terms are sufficiently distinct that it is possible for the accidents to be separated from the substance without themselves undergoing any further change. The accidents have place, causal action, and perceptible presence directly, whereas the substance has them only indirectly, by means of the accidents. Because substance has place, external action, and appearance only indirectly, these can be attributed to it only insofar as we conceive of it as the efficient or quasi-efficient cause of the accidents.
It seems, then, if Aquinas’s account of Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist is correct, that corporeal substances in general neither have nor or are capable of having any direct presence in the world. In principle, after all, any corporeal substance can cease to exist without any discernible change in the world around us. Hence these substances are not objects of experience: they are known by inference, as metaphysical postulates. Being efficient or quasi-efficient causes, that is, they are unknown to us except insofar as we suppose them to have perceivable effects, through a mode of causation that does not fall within our experience. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that already in thirteenth-century theology, substance has become the “something, we know not what,” that figures so prominently in the development of modern and postmodern epistemology (Locke 1975, bk. 2, chap. 23, §§ 1–6).
From a certain point of view, of course, none of this seems particularly problematic. In Aristotle, one major reason for introducing the distinction between substance and accidents is to escape the ancient dilemma consisting of the static monism of Parmenides and the universal flux of Heraclitus. Once Aristotle’s distinction is in place, we can affirm that in a wide range of familiar cases, many changing accidents exist in, or inhere in, or belong to a single unchanging substance. In fact, every attribute that contributes directly to a substance’s appearance and action in the world is subject to change, and must therefore be classified as an accident. The substance itself, then, must be hidden behind the accidents, waiting to be inferred from them as a metaphysical postulate. What else could an Aristotelian think?8
It seems to me, however, that we have good reason to seek an alternative understanding of the relation between substance and accidents. In order to see why, consider Matthew Levering’s attempt to retrieve and motivate Aquinas’s account of transubstantiation within a contemporary theological context.9 After a great deal of preparation, much of which is extremely helpful and all of which, it seems to me, is faithful to Thomas’s theological approach, Levering eventually offers his own introduction to the distinction between substance and accidents:
“Accidents” describe a thing empirically; “substance” describes a thing insofar as it is a whole, not dependent for its wholeness on any particular “accident.” My “quantity,” for instance, can change radically. The tiny embryo was none other than me; to kill the embryo would have been to kill me. Yet the embryo lacked many crucial aspects that now characterize “me” and possessed many aspects that now do not belong to “me.” Something has radically stayed the same, while other things have radically changed. “Substance” does no more than name the reality, empirically describable in terms of its “accidents,” that remains the same through a change in its “accidental” characteristics.(Levering 2005, p. 147)
Ordinarily, however, the word “whole” suggests a reality whose unity is found in and through its parts, and in the present context these parts can only be the accidents. We thus quickly find ourselves facing a series of parallel alternatives. First, is the unity of a corporeal substance located (i) “under” the multiplicity of its discernible attributes, or is it to be found (ii) “in” these attributes? Second, does the persistence of the substance as its attributes change imply (i) a reality distinct from all the attributes and completely immune from change? Or does it imply only (ii) a wide range of changes that a given substance can undergo while remaining the same individual, within the same kind? Third and last, is the dependence of the accidents on the substance (i) a matter of one-way, efficient or quasi-efficient causality, or does it mean that (ii) many of a thing’s attributes belong to a whole apart from which they cannot be what they are?10
In introducing the concept of substance, Levering seems to want this concept to be intuitive and uncontroversial. The term “substance,” he writes, “does no more than name” a certain “whole, not dependent for its wholeness on any particular ‘accident.’” These formulations suggest that in each alternative, we should select option (ii). He also writes, however, that accidents “describe a thing empirically,” and that a substance is “empirically describable” only in terms of its accidents. In this respect, his discussion suggests a rather different view. Unless one adopts something like Hume’s atomism concerning experience, after all, there is no opposition between being a whole and being empirically describable. In any case, the scholastic account of transubstantiation requires that in each alternative we select option (i).
For Levering, in fact, as for Aquinas, the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist is far from being intuitive and uncontroversial. Aware of this, he invites us into Christ’s presence by way of spiritual and intellectual discipline in the service of faith. Aquinas, he writes “traces a route of metaphysical ascesis, in which we follow the path of bodily change but purify our minds of attachment to our imagistic understanding of ‘bodily.’” He continues:
Here the language of wholeness, which made the concept of substance intuitive, has been replaced by the Aristotelian metaphor that presents a substance as “underlying” its accidents. It is a profound, beautiful metaphor; and yet, like all metaphors, it must be handled carefully. Aristotle does, of course, sometimes use the word hupokeimenon in the most literal, etymological sense, to mean “that which lies under.” This was not, however, the word’s ordinary meaning when he adopted it for philosophical purposes, and it should not be considered to involve, essentially, a foundation entirely hidden beneath a superstructure of accidents.11As we have argued, there must be something that underlies change in quantity. Yet, this reality cannot be empirically describable, since empirical description inevitably employs the terms of changeable accidents. This underlying reality that constitutes a thing’s continuity is, as we noted above, called “substance.” Under normal bodily rules, a “substance” is present in the world “by way of,” or according to the empirical mode of, its “accidents.”The metaphysical ascesis which we are undertaking in order to speak theologically about the Eucharist, however, enables us to recognize that the “substance” could be present, by God’s power, according to its own mode. In such a situation, the “accidents” would be sublated under the mode of the “substance,” rather than the other way around. This possibility, without losing its mystery as a sacramental mode of being, would describe a bodily change.(Levering 2005, p. 150)
Although Levering introduces the phrase “metaphysical ascesis” for the case of the Eucharist, it is clear that Thomas’s account of the Eucharist does not allow any corporeal substance to exist, fundamentally, in and through the attributes by which it is present in the world. It is inevitable, therefore, that the concept of substance itself should come to depend not so much on ordinary experience as on a vigorous discipline of the mind that not everyone is willing to undertake: “‘Substance’ can only be conceived through metaphysical ascesis, but that does not make it any less real” (Levering 2005, p. 154). We are faced, then, with two mutually exclusive possibilities. On the one hand, we might think—as I do—that the existence of substances is not or at least ought not to be controversial, for it is a matter of direct experience, so deeply embedded in our everyday descriptive language that we cannot avoid it even if we wish. The impoverished notion of experience characteristic of early modern empiricism is mistaken, and although the reality of substances can indeed be clarified by philosophical reflection, properly speaking it neither requires nor admits of inference.12 On the other hand, one might think that the standard scholastic account of Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist is correct. I am not sure how it would be possible to think both.
2.3. Substance as an Object of Experience
From the metaphysical point of view, then, the most worrisome feature of Aquinas’s account—or rather, of the scholastic account more generally—is not anything unique to the Eucharist. It is instead the pressure that a particular understanding of the Eucharist puts on the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident. By prompting us to think that accidents are entirely separable from their proper subjects, even if only by divine power, this account introduces an uncomfortable gap between the core reality of a thing and its manifest attributes. It is true that for Aquinas, at least, the gap seems to imply separability on one side only: accidents can be made to exist without their proper subjects, but a substance cannot be made to exist without its proper accidents (those accidents that belong to it in virtue of its own intrinsic principles) (Wippel 2000, pp. 266–68). Yet it is difficult to say why proper accidents cannot be suppressed entirely: Aquinas thinks of them as “flowing” or “emanating” from their subjects as from an active or productive cause, and ordinarily, an active or productive cause can be prevented from operating.
In fact, this metaphorical description of the connection between substance and proper accident leaves the connection between them almost entirely obscure, so that even Aquinas’s most thorough commentators are perplexed to say what it might mean. Here is the conclusion of John Wippel’s discussion, which illustrates both the obscurity of the doctrine and its essential role in Aquinas’s account of the accidents of bread and wine in the Eucharist:
One might wish that Thomas had spelled out more fully what it means for the soul or for a substantial subject to serve “in a certain way” as an active or productive or efficient cause of its proper accidents. For some reason he has not seen fit to do so. … Since Thomas regards [the proper accidents], and especially the powers of the soul, as distinct from the essence of the substance or soul, he holds that the subject may be regarded as their proximate cause, and even as their proximate active or efficient cause in some sense. To view the subject or soul as a mere receiving cause of such accidents is not sufficient.And if the subject or soul serves as a proximate efficient cause for the coming into being of such accidents or powers, it fulfills this same function in accounting for their continued existence. Perhaps we can best express this by saying that the subject or soul exercises a kind of instrumental efficient causality regarding such proper accidents. As Thomas sees things, they, like their substantial subject, will continue to depend on some extrinsic principal efficient cause as well, at least upon God, for their continuing existence.(Wippel 2000, p. 275)
This obscurity of the Thomistic doctrine strikes me as a matter of principle. According to Aquinas, we are in principle ignorant of the essential differences of even the most familiar sensible substances. When we speak of the natures of these substances, we signify them “by way of accidental differences, which arise from the essential ones, in the manner in which a cause is signified by way of its effect” (De ente, chap. 5).13 If we know the essence of any substance only indirectly, through its proper accidents, it is no wonder that the active causation exercised by the substance with respect to these accidents cannot be elucidated.
What about the original causal role of substance, as the subject in which accidents inhere? In the texts cited by Wippel, at least, Thomas does little to elucidate this role: the concept of a substance as receptive of accidents by means of a passive power seems more or less taken for granted (Wippel 2000, pp. 266–75). Given that the substance as such is unknown, however, it seems problematic to take for granted the relation of inherence that accidents bear to it.
When Thomas tries to articulate what accidents in general are, moreover, one of his major concerns is precisely to allow for the existence of accidents that do not inhere in any subject:
[1] Since being [ens] is not a genus, [2] to be [esse] itself cannot be the essence of substance or accident. [3a] The definition of substance, then, is not “a being through itself, without a subject”; [3b] nor is the definition of accident “a being in a subject.” But [4a] it is appropriate to the quiddity or essence of a substance to have being not in a subject, whereas [4b] to the quiddity or essence of an accident it is appropriate to have being in a subject. [5] In this sacrament, however, it is not given to the accidents that by the force of their own essence they are without a subject, but by the divine power that sustains them.(ST III, q. 77, a. 1 ad 2)14
However, this sequence of claims contains a significant gap. At the beginning of the quotation, we can see that (1) entails (2), and that (2) implies (3a) and (3b). At the end, we can see that (5) is compatible with (4b), as Aquinas intends. Statement (4b), however, is not a consequence of (3b) but an alternative to it. The alternative is recognizably true, but it is not the strongest alternative possible. Having granted (3b), we might just as well assert that to the quiddity or essence of an accident it is not appropriate—or even, more simply, it is impossible—to have being not in a subject.
By no means do I wish to suggest that Aquinas’s account of the relation between a substance and its accidents should be thrown out entirely. Focusing just on the points that are most prominent in his discussion of the Eucharist, I think that Thomas—and Levering with him—succeed in showing at least the following. First, because a substance is a genuine whole, its presence ultimately defies precise localization. Second, wherever a substantial whole is present, its accidents are present too, not necessarily in their own mode but in the mode of the substance to which they belong.15 Both these claims, in fact, hold of naturally existing substances, quite apart from the Eucharist. Thus I am present as a whole in each of my bodily parts: each part belongs to me in such a way as to be permeated with my wholeness as the substance I am. Nor is the substantial whole present in my left pinkie, say, present there in such a way as to be metaphysically separated from the physical attributes of my right eye. Clearly, however, the attributes of the eye are not present in my pinkie by way of their own proper natures, but by way of their connection with the whole substance to which they belong.
These are insightful reflections concerning the relation between genuine wholes and their parts, and I will make use of them in developing an alternative account of transubstantiation below. When, however, Thomas applies these insights to Christ in the Eucharist, he presupposes that the accidents of bread and wine can be separated from their proper substances, so that the substance of Christ’s body can be contained under them instead—and this, as he himself recognizes, is the great difficulty. To repeat, the difficulty as I see it is not the use of language that we do not really understand—this, after all, is proper to children, and so it is proper to Christians in matters of faith. Instead, I am concerned about the use of language that, it turns out, has a strong tendency to undermine our everyday convictions concerning the things we seem to know best.
Once Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist is deemed to be possible due to the radical hiddenness of substance as such, it becomes an important metaphysical doctrine that what looks and quacks like a duck—to be precise, what looks and quacks like a duck in every possible respect—may not be a duck at all. Conversely, a genuine duck may not look or act like a duck in any respect whatsoever. We thus begin to sense, as suggested above, the metaphysical milieu to which this view of substance and accident seems to belong. With substances forced into hiding, and accidents separable from their substances, we have entered the world of Locke, Hume, and Kant: a world in which reality in the full sense, if it exists at all, is so thoroughly hidden as to be undiscoverable by human beings.
Nor is my point here that the separation of accidents from their proper subjects is deceptive, an objection to which Thomas has an adequate response: in considering the Eucharist—which, we might add, is a highly exceptional case—the intellect is preserved by faith from being deceived concerning the substance contained under the accidents of bread and wine after the consecration (ST III, q. 75, a. 5 ad 2). Rather, my point is that this understanding of the Eucharist implies that the ontological heart of every corporeal being, its substance, is permanently and completely removed from human view.
As Hume later argued, moreover, it is not even clear that the existence of substances can be inferred from that which lies within our experience (Hume 2007, bk. 1, pt. 1, § 6 [SB 15–16]; bk. 1, pt. 4, § 3 [SB 220–21]). Aquinas holds, not only in the case of the Eucharist but quite generally, that all the other accidents of a corporeal substance inhere in it by means of its dimensive quantity, and that God can bring it about that dimensive quantity should serve as the ultimate subject of the remaining accidents. What, then, is the use of the substance? The usual order of things, in which accidents depend on a substance, now appears highly arbitrary, and the whole discussion seems to have become circular: substances can be known, as to both their existence and their nature, only through their accidents; but the internal coherence of the accidents among themselves and in their external effects remains perfectly intact even without the substance; hence we in fact have no grounds for positing the existence of the substance in the first place.
It seems, in fact, that this consequence was already beginning to make itself felt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As we have just seen, Aquinas himself must face the question about divine deception. Scotus articulates the larger difficulty, and this seems to be an important reason for his disagreement with Aquinas concerning the sense or senses of the term “being.” Scotus holds that “being,” as predicated of substance and accident, is univocal rather than analogical, and he adopts this view in part because he thinks that the doctrine of the Eucharist implies precisely the gulf I have just described between substance and accident. Given that we have no direct experience of any substance, he argues, we can have nothing whatsoever to say about substance unless we take it to count as a being in the same sense as are accidents, of which we do have direct experience (LaZella 2019, pp. 34–35).
Catherine Pickstock has tried to show that the ontological rupture posited by the Thomistic account of transubstantiation provokes only a momentary skepticism; more deeply, it unites a thoroughly premodern sensibility with her own post-Derridean reflections. On Pickstock’s account, faith in the Eucharist does affirm at one level the existence, and therefore the more general possibility, of a complete break between appearance and reality. In the same act, however, faith affirms that the sensible appearances of bread and wine remain real—they are accidents, not phantoms—and that they are in fact more deeply reliable than we had supposed, insofar as they effectively mediate the divine presence. Faith in the Eucharist thus makes us aware of “a trustworthiness of appearances even beyond their known, everyday predictable trustworthiness” (Pickstock 1999, p. 165; see also Pickstock 1998, pp. 259–61). This reading seems to require saddling Duns Scotus with all blame for the development of the modern problematic out of scholastic concerns; the history of philosophy, however, is rarely so simple (Pickstock 1998, pp. 121–35). We do not grasp the whole truth, nor can we possibly take responsibility for all the consequences of our ideas.
Yet Pickstock’s analysis raises an important question. Faced with the contrast between her loosely Thomistic mysticism and the critique of Aquinas that I have just undertaken, one might worry that I have fallen victim to a problematic rationalism—a metaphysics of presence, even!—that attempts to collapse each thing into its own surface, depriving it of depth and rejecting the very possibility of mystery. At least in this case, however, appearances would be deceiving. What I object to is neither depth nor mystery, but what strikes me as the artificial creation of depth and mystery—as well as the creation of apparent understanding—by way of abstract formulas.
One cannot, of course, stand within the Aristotelian tradition at all without thinking that some beings are correctly described as accidents, and that accidents at least typically inhere in substances. If, however, we think we have achieved real metaphysical insight by creating or appropriating the word “inherence” and using it to describe the connection between accident and substance, we are in danger of creating and resolving metaphysical problems merely by deploying verbal formulae.
Let us say, for example, that I am asked what it means for the attribute dimensive quantity to inhere in a substance of the genus body. I will begin by answering that I deploy the word “body” only on the basis of dimensive quantity, and that so far as I can tell, actual extendedness in three dimensions is constitutive of bodiliness. If I am then asked how I account for the persistence of certain bodies through changes in size and shape, I will not answer that the actual dimensive quantity of a given body inheres in something distinct from and more fundamental than this quantity, something I call a “substance” and take to be knowable only through the quantity itself and other such “accidents.” If this suggestion is made, moreover, I will respond that given the hiddenness of the substance so understood, this substance cannot be the basis of my perception that the body in question does in fact persist through changes of size and shape. I will then return to experience, seeking to discern within it why I do have the impression that I am dealing with something that persists through these changes.
As I struggle to give a substantive answer to the question, I will find that I have begun to do metaphysics in a phenomenological mode—that I have turned, with Husserl, away from reliance on traditional formulae and back to the things themselves, as they manifest themselves to us within our experience. This does not mean that I have turned away from metaphysics, or even from the distinction between substance and accident. Rather, the problem lies on the one hand in an excessively logicized metaphysics, and on the other in the radicalized distinction between substance and accidents on which the scholastic account of transubstantiation depends.
This radicalization not inevitable. For an insightful, coherent approach to substance that does not depend on it, we need only return to Aristotle himself. In the various dialectical contexts in which Aristotle defends and deploys the distinction between substance and accidents, this distinction is much more intuitive and flexible. Aristotle neither has nor needs, for example, any distinction between a substance’s form and its defining powers. There is no need for form as a principle of unity underlying the powers, because the powers of a given substance are essentially unified among themselves.16 Neither, however, are the forms of natural substances completely static realities, present in their entirety from the substance’s first moment of existence. On the contrary, a substance’s complete form emerges over time, through a process of development initiated, but not completed, by an external efficient cause.
This more flexible, empirical approach—which owes as much to the demands of natural science as to those of an abstract analysis anchored in logic, and which is highly amenable to the insights of phenomenology—does not undermine the truths that we need the distinction between substance and accident to serve. It certainly brings form and substance much closer to the surfaces of things, giving us a world of beings whose hearts, in many ways, are firmly affixed to their sleeves. It does not, however, preclude the inner depth proper to each substance.
In a purely corporeal substance, such as an Aristotelian element, this depth is minimal. These are shallow beings, hardly substances at all,17 and their depth consists of nothing but a cumulative sequence of qualitative and quantitative powers.18 Water is wet and cold, air wet and hot. If water is heated sufficiently, the cold by which it is constituted is entirely overcome and replaced by heat, which is a defining quality. The immediate natural consequence of this heat is expansion: given enough space, the new body of air will take on a larger volume: a defining quantity. In expanding, it will become rarer, or less dense, and therefore lighter; hence it will tend to move upward until it is higher than the sphere immediately around the earth in which water naturally settles: a defining place. At the beginning of this process, we called the new substance “air” simply because it was wet and hot, and was therefore inclined to take on certain other attributes as well. For Aristotle, that is, the tangible qualities wet and hot are not mere accidents, causally dependent on an underlying form beyond our experience. They are rather, in themselves, the first steps in the emergence of the element’s form.
In the case of a sentient being, a similar process of development ends in a substance whose inner depth is much greater, although still entirely bound to the corporeal world. An embryo, that is, does not have the complete form of the animal into which it will develop. It does, however, have the right sort of nutritive power—a power that, given a supportive environment, will naturally produce organs in which the power of sensation can take root.19 To the extent that there is an internal efficient cause of the emergence of certain powers over the course of this process, this cause is not a form distinct from the powers taken collectively; it is the nutritive power itself. The unity and depth of the sentient being transcends the purely corporeal, insofar as it involves perception and desire, but it is found in the sensory powers, not beyond them.
In the human case, finally, the intellectual soul, which is the human form, need not be considered distinct from the intellectual powers. The arguments that lead Aquinas to the soul’s natural and individual immortality are not thereby weakened.20 Here alone, then, in the corporeal world, do we find a form that is present in and through the corporeal, but is not ultimately subject to the vicissitudes of matter. Its substantial unity and depth transcend corporeality, so that the perceptible human body becomes the outward manifestation or expression of the interior depth proper to a person. In the order of nature, moreover, the human intellect can act only through the sensory and appetitive powers, without which the human form is no more complete than the form of a kitten in whose eyes there is not yet the power of sight.
Aquinas himself is clearly aware of what I will call the honest depth of even the most homely substances. In the prologue to his commentary on the Apostle’s Creed, he famously writes that the human manner of knowing “is so weak that no philosopher could ever fully track down the nature of a single fly—hence the story, that one philosopher spent thirty years in solitude, getting to know the nature of a bee” (In Symb. apost., pr.). This is the honest depth to be found in every creature, a depth that for practical purposes, at least, is already infinite. It is familiar to every working scientist—and it speaks to us, if we are willing to dwell in solitude with it, of an infinitely greater depth in which the creature as a whole is founded. After thirty years studying the bee, the philosophical scientist will not, I suspect, proclaim that she knows many of the bee’s accidental differences, but of course remains ignorant of its essence. She will confess instead that she knows many of its essential differences, but imperfectly—and that ten times as long would not suffice to know them as they deserve to be known. She does not need, for this humble acknowledgement of the depth and mystery of reality, an excessively logicized metaphysics in which substance in itself is unknowable as a matter of principle.
I am writing in hindsight, of course. I do think that the problems I have described are present in Aquinas—or at least that his articulations often lend themselves to the difficulties that make me uneasy with them, and that it is not easy to see how and why to follow him in these articulations. Yet I also find in Aquinas many brilliant phenomenological sketches, and countless other riches. He has taught me how to think at all, and it is doubtful whether I shall ever manage to disagree with one of his conclusions except by composing a variation on some theme I first learned from him.
Let us take stock. Aquinas thinks himself compelled by faith to assert that the substance of bread and of wine does not persist after the consecration, and compelled by sensation to assert that the accidents of bread and wine do persist. He understands the distinction between substance and accidents in such a way that it does not preclude this exceptional state of affairs; the Eucharist is metaphysically possible. However, it is also more difficult to understand than the act of creation itself, and presumably also than any other miracle. It is in fact a stumbling block, intended by God at least in part to purify our faith (ST III, q. 75, a. 1 c., a. 5 c.). Faith does not here face a dead end, a wall closing the way, but rather a darkness that the intellect cannot penetrate. We simply do not know what it means to say that a corporeal substance is contained by accidents without being their subject, or that accidents contain a corporeal substance without inhering in it.
We need not, I have argued, consider this lack of understanding theologically unacceptable. If Aquinas is correct in his premises, and in his understanding of these premises, then a Christian must simply accept the darkness of faith. Perhaps this is a blow to our egos, but that is a small price to pay for bodily union with Christ. If, however, there is another orthodox way to think metaphysically about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, then it is no afront to faith to explore this way. In hearing the Gospel, we should not depart from Christ because his words are difficult. In preaching it, however, we should do what we can to avoid introducing difficulties of our own. I have suggested that from a purely philosophical point of view, we are better off without the radicalized distinction between substance and accident on which the scholastic account of the Eucharist depends. We have good reason to explore, then, whether we can do without it in theology.
3. Transubstantiation and Culture
3.1. Sign and Signified
Having expressed his own reasons for abandoning Aquinas’s view, Grisez tentatively sketches an alternative. In the Eucharist, he suggests, bread and wine are transformed into new, additional parts of Christ’s body and blood. The accidents that had previously belonged to bread and wine are not rendered ontologically homeless; rather, they inhere in these new parts of Christ (Grisez 2000, pp. 123–26). To provide a theological motive for this proposal, Grisez draws an analogy between Eucharistic communion and marital intimacy, the former being consummated through the new parts or even “organs” that Jesus takes on in the sacrament (pp. 126–28).
I intend to argue that on one important point, Grisez is correct. Because he fails to identify the proper context for this point, however, his theory as a whole is unacceptable. Grisez takes the Eucharist to be Christ himself by constituting an extension of, and indeed an addition to, our Lord’s humanity. In and through this addition, the God-man comes to be materially present wherever the Eucharist is celebrated. In making this suggestion, Grisez implicitly marks out a fundamental alternative to Aquinas’s view. Either, that is, Christ is substantially present because He comes to be present or contained under the appearances of bread and wine without Himself undergoing any change or addition, or He is present because what were once ordinary bread and wine have been taken up into the person of Christ, being essentially transformed in the process.
Despite identifying this fundamental alternative, Grisez fails to show how it could contain any real theological insight, rather than merely resolving a philosopher’s puzzle. In fact, the “extension view” as Grisez presents it is decidedly unattractive. He suggests that we think of the consecrated bread and wine as new parts or even organs of Christ’s human body, but he does little to clarify what this might mean. If his language is metaphorical, then it is not clear how much it accomplishes. If it is literal, then the defined doctrines have been preserved by making Christ’s human body essentially unlike all other human bodies. It becomes a strange amalgam or hybrid, more disturbing, one might well think, than consoling. Levering, responding to the somewhat different view of David Fagerberg but with Grisez in mind as well, puts it this way: “How can the matter of bread and wine be transformed into Christ’s body and blood without thereby composing a material body quite distinct from the ‘material body’ that the living, glorified Christ possesses in a completely unchanging mode in heaven?” (Levering 2005, pp. 131–32; compare 142n77).
The distasteful impression made by Grisez’s brave new body of Christ was quickly expressed by Roch Kereszty (Kereszty 2000, p. 349; cf. Kurek 2003, p. 132). Even more forcefully than Levering and Brock, moreover, Kereszty draws attention to the importance of sacramentality as such for Aquinas’s metaphysical account of the Eucharist:
Contrary to Grisez, Aquinas, in fact, has the beginnings of an ontology of symbol, even though he has not consistently applied it to the Eucharistic mystery. It is evident for him that God keeps in existence the accidents of bread and wine miraculously (after their whole substance is turned into the whole substance of Christ’s Body and Blood), because the words of consecration establish an intimate ontological unity between the signs and the reality which the signs signify and make present. Thus, unlike Grisez, Thomas knows about an intimate ontological connection not only between substance and accident but also, in the context of Salvation History, between the sign and the reality signified by it. Therefore, he does not see the slightest ’isolation’ but rather a very close habitudo (an ontological relationship) between the sacramental species and the Body and Blood of Christ; it is in and through the former that the latter is manifested and communicated.(Kereszty 2000, pp. 349–50)
In the thought of Karl Rahner, moreover, Kereszty finds an ontology of symbol that he considers powerful enough to uphold the full doctrine of transubstantiation—powerful enough, that is, to ground a clear, theologically adequate distinction between the Eucharist and all merely human symbols. According to Rahner, reality as a whole is symbolic. Creation expresses the creator, the human person as image of God expresses God’s inner life, the human body expresses the soul, and so forth. The Incarnation elevates and transforms this pervasive symbolic structure, and the logic of the Incarnation continues in the Eucharist (Kereszty 2000, p. 350).
In particular, Kereszty suggests, the Eucharist constitutes a divine intensification and transformation of the symbolic structure of ordinary human gift-giving, in which a visible, tangible gift expresses the self-giving of the giver. Transubstantiation means that unlike such ordinary gifts, the Eucharistic bread and wine no longer exist in themselves, but only as effective signs of Christ’s body and blood. This change in mode of existing is so radical that it brings with it a change in essence: what had been bread or wine is now Christ himself, His presence mediated by what Kereszty calls “the remaining empirical properties of bread and wine”—these being, presumably, what Aquinas calls “accidents” (Kereszty 2000, p. 351). This change is a true conversion, not an annihilation with replacement, insofar as in it bread and wine are raised to their “transcendent, eschatological perfection” (ibid.). This seems to mean that ordinary bread and wine have always existed as foretastes of the fuller divine self-giving found in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, therefore, they cease to exist only insofar as they reach their essential fulfillment, becoming that which they symbolize.
There is much to like in Kereszty’s proposal, which complements the more traditional defenses of Aquinas offered by Levering and Brock by developing an aspect of Aquinas’s account that they recognize as important but, like Aquinas himself, leave relatively undeveloped. Kereszty’s articulation differs from Aquinas’s in two main ways. On the one hand, he loosens up the terms of the problem by substituting the vaguer “empirical properties” for Aquinas’s “accidents.” On the other, he suggests that by understanding the symbolic structure of reality we can come to recognize that these properties are not ontologically homeless. Even if they do not inhere in Christ’s body and blood as accidents in a substance, their sacramental connection with Him is such that they no longer exist in themselves but only as signs. The difficulty, as I see it, lies precisely in the conjunction of these differences: Kereszty opens up an intriguing ontological possibility, that of a sign whose very being depends on the reality it signifies, only by turning away from the precision of Aquinas’s ontological formulations, and the difficulties they pose.
As a result, Grisez’s central worry can be reformulated in Kereszty’s terms. Kereszty says that the “remaining empirical properties” of bread and wine exist no longer in themselves, but only as signs. It should be clear, however, that in order to serve as signs these properties must first be something in themselves. They must be precisely the empirical properties of bread and wine, and they must belong, in their essential reality as properties, neither to bread and wine nor to anything else. In short, they are accidents without a subject. There is nothing at all, moreover—nothing beyond, if I may put it this way, the authoritative say-so of Christ—to distinguish them from purely extrinsic signs, and it remains quite unclear how the properties of one substance can be made to signify another substance in such a way as to make the latter substantially present. Kereszty says only that “the God-man, Jesus Christ … ought to be able to do this.” The reasons he gives are suggestive, but they fail to display the intrinsic possibility of the arrangement.
Levering, who briefly explores the role of sacramentality in the Thomistic texts, seems to run into a similar difficulty. He follows Aquinas in holding that the persisting accidents of bread and wine are not attributes of Christ, but rather subsist in themselves (Levering 2005, pp. 156–60). He then attributes to these accidents “an iconic, sacramental purpose” (p. 158). Finally, he asserts that in the Eucharist, the sacramental sign simply is the reality it signifies (pp. 160–61). It is hard to see how all three statements can be strictly true, for the accidents of bread and wine are on the one hand intrinsic to the sacramental sign and on the other sharply distinct from the reality it signifies.21
Aquinas’s own formulations, in fact, are more precise. A sign, he holds with Augustine, is “that which, beyond the appearance it presents to the senses, brings some other thing to mind as well [facit aliquid aliud in cognitionem venire]” (ST III, q. 60, a. 1 obj. 2). A sacrament, then, insofar as it is a sign, is that which brings to mind a sacred and sanctifying reality distinct from the sign itself (q. 60, a. 1 c.). Of course, a sacrament of the new law does not only signify such a reality: it causes it as well, and so also contains it, in the manner in which an instrumental cause contains its effect (q. 61, a. 4 ad 2; q. 62, aa. 1, 3, 6. These new relations, however—causation and containment—do not annul but rather incorporate and enrich the distinction between sign and signified, thus defining a more perfect sacramentality that culminates in the Eucharist (q. 63, a. 6 c.; q. 65, a. 3). For this reason, Aquinas does not claim that the sacrament as such is Christ, but that Christ is “contained in” the sacrament, “under” the species of bread and wine.22
Aquinas does not speak, then, of identity between sign and signified, but of causation and containment. There are, however, deep patristic roots to the idea of the Eucharist as a sign that, by divine power, has become so closely connected with that which it signifies as to be identical with it. Kereszty points to the work of Betz on St. John Damascene, who in turn aims to sum up the Greek tradition as a whole (Kereszty 2000, p. 351).23 It is not surprising, therefore, to find the same suggestion in the more recent Eucharistic theology of Jean-Luc Marion, to which we shall return (Marion 1974, p. 38, cited in Rosemann 2005, p. 242). The problem, I suggest, lies not in the theology of the Greek Fathers but in the attempt to conjoin this theology with the analysis of St. Thomas in terms of substance and accident.
Here is the difficulty as it now appears: First, it belongs to the very nature of a sign to be distinct from that which it signifies—to leave the signified at a distance. Second, that which appears to our senses in the Eucharist is a sign of the body and blood of Christ, and is therefore distinct from it. Third, the distinction between sign and signified proper to the Eucharist as a sacrament is compatible with the identity between sign and signified posited by the Greek Fathers only if the sign itself has as its proper ontological location the person of Christ himself. Fourth, this requires what I have called an “extension theory” of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: a theory on which there exists a reality that is Christ himself, but that would not be part of Him if it were not for the Eucharist. Finally, Aquinas’s analysis is not an extension theory. It stands or falls with the claim that the persistent accidents of bread and wine are not to be identified with Christ; instead, Christ is merely “contained under” them.24
Aquinas’s proposal, therefore—that Christ becomes present in the Eucharist without undergoing any change or addition at all, insofar as He is contained under the accidents proper to substances quite different from Himself—remains problematic. Grisez offers us an alternative, by suggesting that we think of the Eucharist as an addition to or extension of the person of Christ. He runs into trouble, however, insofar as he presents this extension as a new part or organ of Christ’s glorified human body. All Aquinas’s defenders, finally, agree that moving forward requires understanding the distinctive sacramental or symbolic connection between the accidents of bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ. Yet they fail to elucidate this connection in such a way as to alleviate the basic difficulties inherent in Aquinas’s account.
Kereszty, however, does push the discussion forward by gesturing toward a general ontology of symbol. I suggest that in using the concept of a symbol, he implicitly locates the Eucharist within the larger realm of human culture. Philosophically speaking, in fact, this is precisely where the sacraments in general belong. In every sacrament, a human being makes something happen by word and gesture, drawing out the symbolism of which nature is capable by incorporating natural substances into distinctive, contingent cultural forms. The human being in question acts in the person of Christ, and this of course makes a crucial difference. The result, however, is not something other than culture; it is culture elevated and transformed by the presence at its heart of the Word made flesh. What, then, if we were to rethink the Eucharist in terms not of an addition to Christ’s natural body, but of a new cultural reality that takes its place, by His authority, within the mystery of His person? In human life as a whole, nature and culture are often so seamlessly integrated that we find it difficult to mark a difference between them. Might the ordinary integration of nature and culture show us how to locate the Eucharist within the person of the Word made flesh?
By locating symbol within culture, I do not intend to neglect Rahner’s claim concerning the symbolic nature of reality as a whole. I would prefer to say, though—using the language that Kereszty employs to summarize Rahner and that we also find in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body—that reality as a whole has an expressive character, rather than consisting of symbols in the strict sense (Kereszty 2000, p. 350; John Paul II 2006, §§14.4, 15.1, etc.). The body is an expression of the person; Christ’s humanity expresses His divinity; and God the Father expresses himself in an eternal Word. The term “symbol,” in contrast, has always implied convention, and thus culture. Aristotle writes that a spoken word is significant by convention; this makes it not just a sign, in the sense in which smoke is a sign of fire, but a symbol: a contingent, culturally rich token of the ways in which our souls are affected by the realities with which we come in contact (Walz 2006, pp. 230–51).
A symbol need not be purely conventional, of course. In onomatopoeia, a spoken sound is chosen for its resemblance to the reality it signifies. Yet it is still chosen. It results from a convention by which we agree in representing a nonverbal sound in one way—drip!—rather than another. Similarly, the use of bread, blessed, broken, and given, to signify Christ’s bodily self-giving is deeply appropriate, but it does not follow from the order of nature alone. It is conventional, in the sense of resulting from a fitting but contingent decision made by Christ and received in obedience by the Church. If, therefore, the required identity between the consecrated bread and wine and the person of Christ is to be understood through a theology of symbol, then it must be understood within the broader context of human culture, and of the human capacity for agreed-upon modes of creative communication and expression.
Adopting an understanding of the Eucharist in terms of culture need not land us outside the bounds of Catholic teaching. Dominika Kurek, who echoes Kereszty’s critique of Grisez but doubts the ontological coherence of Kereszty’s proposal, refers us instead to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological defense of the concept of transubstantiation (Kurek 2003, pp. 135–36). Marion’s trenchant critique of contemporary theories of the Eucharist in terms of meanings enacted by the worshipping community shows how ordinary appeals to human culture go astray. It thus begins to uncover the terms on which an explicitly cultural understanding of the Eucharist might prove successful.
Drawing on his own phenomenological analysis of idolatry, Marion attacks the attempt to enclose the Eucharist within human culture by understanding it in terms of transignification (Marion 2012, pp. 165–69). Such accounts, he shows, condemn us to idolatry insofar as they entail that Christ’s presence among us is produced and measured by the collective consciousness of the worshipping community. The problem here is not just a departure from traditional doctrine; it is rather a capitulation to the view that God cannot make himself known to us in such a way as to break through our essential enclosure within an autonomous quest for meaning. Like Heidegger, such theories affirm that only a god can save us—and then insist that this god can appear only within a world defined by our own efforts to reach him.
Marion’s critique of idolatry implicitly reveals the terms on which it might be possible to contemplate the Eucharist as a work of human culture under the heading not of transignification—at least as transignification is ordinarily understood—but of genuine transubstantiation. To understand transubstantiation in cultural terms, we must at minimum believe that the Eucharist exists, and indeed that it is possible at all, only by the loving authority of the God-man himself, and in no way by the choice or understanding of an ordinary human community. The role of the Church in transubstantiation can be no more than obedient reception of a cultural reality instituted by Christ alone (Marion 2012, p. 165).
3.2. Sacramental Conversion
How might such an account go? We may begin with the requirement that transubstantiation constitute a genuine conversion, in which a reality of one sort is changed in some reasonably straightforward sense into a reality of another sort. This requirement does not only head off the conclusion that bread and wine are annihilated by their consecration. Much more, it gives a robust, literal sense to the crucial liturgical theme of divinum commercium, the divine exchange in which our own gifts to God are first made possible by His bounty, and then taken up beyond hope into the love by which He wills to give us His very self. This is why the defined doctrines speak of a conversion, and why Aquinas works so hard to show that he really is presenting transubstantiation as a conversion, despite appearances to the contrary.
The first requirement for any conversion is its point of departure, or terminus a quo, which in the case of the Eucharist is ordinary bread and wine. If we are to understand transubstantiation as a conversion, therefore, we must ask first what bread and wine are in themselves, and what sorts of change they are capable of undergoing. Now the change by which bread and wine become Christ is effected by Christ’s own words. These words were addressed to the twelve, and through them to the entire Church. We may therefore assume that the Eucharistic conversion has as its terminus a quo the realities that the twelve took themselves to be handling when they prepared the Passover meal: bread and wine, understood as these are commonly understood by the ordinary people who make and consume them. Ordinary people seem to agree, however, that bread is “a staple food made by mixing flour and water … to form a dough which is then cooked, usually by baking,” while wine is “the fermented juice of the grape used as a beverage.”25
Written to express common usage, these formulations are also quite precise; indeed, each is a definition by genus and specific difference. In the first the genus is food, while the differences specify the food in question by expressing its material and efficient causes. In the second the genus expresses these causes, while the defining difference is used as a beverage.26 In both cases, that is, the terms we use to explain what we mean by “bread” and “wine” do not signify the material stuffs that we eat and drink simply or even primarily in their own natures as material stuffs. Our words instead signify these substances in their relations to ourselves. This implies, however, that bread and wine as such are cultural realities. It will not be too far off to define culture as including everything produced by a human community on the basis of a shared sense of its own good, where production includes everything from developing a mathematical theory to gathering berries. The simple act of gathering food for one’s family, after all, already layers culture upon nature, conferring on nature’s bounty a new, distinctively human actuality. Like berries in a basket, bread and wine no doubt are, or at least contain, natural substances in a roughly Aristotelian sense. But we do not call them “bread” and “wine” simply insofar as they are natural substances of certain sorts. They receive these names from their places within human culture.27 In Aristotelian terms, bread or wine is constituted materially by some natural substance or substances, but formally by its place within some human community or communities.
One might here raise an objection. According to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the whole substance of the bread and the whole substance of the wine are converted by the words of consecration into something else (DH 1642). According to Aristotle, though, it takes nature to make a substance in the full sense of the word. Is the identification of bread and wine as essentially cultural realities compatible with the language of substance as we find it in the defined doctrines? Yes, for at least two reasons. First, no more of any philosophical theory should be read into the defined doctrines than is required to maintain their theological truth. Aristotelians, however, routinely identify both natural beings and artifacts as substances, in a broad but important sense of the word. The conversion of an artifact into something else, moreover, is at least as intelligible as the conversion of a natural substance. Second, the defined doctrines carefully avoid any strong appeal to Aristotelian philosophy in the first place. They avoid the term “accident,” instead contrasting the substance of bread or wine with its species, or sensible appearance.28 Thus they do not invoke a specifically Aristotelian theory of substance, as opposed, say, to a Platonic one. They require us to believe, I think, only that the whole reality of bread and of wine—whatever exactly that might be—is changed into the body and blood of Christ (compare Marion 2012, pp. 163–64).
We thus move from the termini a quo of the Eucharistic conversion to the conversion itself. We have noted that this conversion is a complete change: the whole substance of bread and the whole substance of wine give way completely to the Lord. If we begin with a precise understanding of the termini a quo, however, a way forward begins to emerge. The words “bread” and “wine” name the natural substances of which bread and wine are composed not insofar as they are the natural substances they are, but insofar as they occupy certain places within the lives of human communities. It follows that if these natural substances were somehow to lose, totally and completely, the places occupied by bread and wine within ordinary human culture, then they would no longer be bread and wine. Bread and wine would have ceased to exist altogether, and the natural substances of which they had been composed would have lost altogether their status as materially constitutive of bread and of wine. Hence neither bread nor wine nor any part of bread or wine would remain.
This interpretation of the phrase “whole substance” develops and clarifies that of Grisez, who says that the whole substance of bread or wine has been converted into Christ’s body and blood if the conversion “leaves behind none of the material that belonged to the thing that changed” (Grisez 2000, p. 126). This phrase suggests to Brock that Grisez has a purely quantitative account of the Tridentine phrase “whole substance” (Brock 2001, p. 534). I think, though, that Grisez’s formulation can be nudged in a more helpful direction. It is sound Aristotelian metaphysics that the matter of any substance, considered in itself, is the substance in question only potentially. If the form of the substance is removed, therefore, it is incorrect to say that some part of the substance, namely its matter, continues to exist. Something continues to exist, but this something is no longer the matter of the substance in question.
Nothing turns, therefore, on the question of whether a purely quantitative meaning of the term “whole” is plausible. The more urgent question raised by Brock concerns the sense in which the Tridentine fathers themselves understood their teaching that the whole substance of bread and of wine is converted into Christ’s body and blood. As Grisez and Brock agree, the answer to this question must be gathered from the historical context of the Tridentine decree on the Eucharist (Grisez 2000, p. 124; Brock 2001, p. 536n14). Yet the immediate context of this decree is not, as Brock suggests, Cajetan’s defense of Aquinas against Durand of St. Pourçain; it is the Protestant Reformation (Brock 2001, pp. 535–36). The pastoral task in which the council fathers took themselves to be engaged is stated explicitly at the beginning of the decree, and their explicit self-understanding limits the scope of their intention to teach in Christ’s name (DH 1635).
As we follow the way opened up by the realization that bread and wine are essentially cultural realities, we arrive next at the precise incompatibility of the doctrine of transubstantiation with typical cultural theories of the Eucharist. Despite the clear status of bread and wine as works of human culture, it is quite impossible for any merely human person or community to bring it about that bread should cease to be bread, or that wine should cease to be wine, without bringing about any natural change in these realities. Not every essentially cultural reality, after all, is changeable ad libitum. Some are so essential to the communities to which they belong that no mere decree can abrogate their existence. Suppose, for example, that the whole community of English speakers were to decide that its own use of the signifier “stop” were for some reason deeply objectionable, and so to pass a decree abrogating the accustomed meaning of this sound. Faced with the pressing needs of a parent by a busy street, or of a young woman on a date gone wrong, this decree would have no force whatsoever. If the word were eventually to become obsolete, its meaning forgotten, then it would indeed have ceased to have that meaning. But this would be a function of use, not of the decree. Despite the conventional nature of language, therefore, not even an entire language community has the power to change arbitrarily the meaning of just any word.
At this point, we need to reflect at least briefly on the relation between power and authority in cultural matters. Cultural realities are, to some degree, subject to the dictates of legitimate authority. Yet they also have a life of their own, a life often so essential to the persons and communities to whom they belong that no human authority can change them by mere fiat. In such a case, authority is power. One who has no authority to change the meaning of a language or of a custom has no direct power to do so. Such a person might, by an imposition of force, cause a given cultural reality to fall by the wayside, and thus cease to exist. But that is not the same as having the power to abrogate it by a simple decree. In some cases, as we have just seen, even the unanimous consent of the community is clearly insufficient.29
Bread and wine are a case in point. Let us say that I should take a loaf of bread and, without in any degree altering its natural power to nourish, declare that it is now part of such and such a work of art, and that for this reason the material reality before us no longer constitutes bread. In the face of real hunger, the unchanging needs of human nature would give me the lie. Bread is bread by its place in human culture, but its place is that of a staple food, and is therefore so robust that, having baked the bread and left it physically intact, neither I nor anyone else has the least degree of authority to alter its status as bread. The same is true of wine, despite the fact that wine as such is seldom essential to our physical existence. The use of alcoholic drinks in this vale of tears is sometimes deeply good, sometimes destructive, but Scripture, including the words of institution themselves, proclaims such drinks sufficiently central to culture that their basic reality escapes the arbitrary exercise of human authority.
The balance here is subtle. Bread and wine are cultural realities, and so their existence as bread and wine depends not only on their deliberate production but on their ongoing places within human communities. They are products of art, so that some societies cannot produce them at all; and they are conventional, insofar as their ingredients and preparation differ from culture to culture. Yet they are so deeply rooted in the needs and possibilities of human nature that once they have been invented, no human community has the capacity to alter their basic meaning, the meaning by which they exist. In such a case, we might say, consignification of various sorts is certainly possible by human authority—in fact, it is routine—but transignification is not. Yet we can also say that if a complete transignification were possible, it would be, ipso facto, transubstantiation as well, in the full sense required by the doctrine of the Eucharist. If, that is, without undergoing any natural change, bread or wine were to lose entirely its essential place within human culture, it would cease entirely to be bread or wine.
If, moreover, Jesus of Nazareth is the one Whom the Church has always believed and proclaimed Him to be, then He does have the authority—and therefore the power—to decree that bread and wine should cease to be bread and wine. By dying and rising from the dead, He has acquired complete authority over the lives of all human persons, communities, and cultures. His is not, of course, the false authority of a tyrant, but that of the servant Who has suffered and been raised. By laying down His own body and taking it up again, He has acquired complete authority over the body and its needs—the authority of the first fruits, Whose risen body reveals what our bodies are one day to be. If He, therefore, declares explicitly or implicitly that a particular loaf of bread is no longer bread, or that a particular cup of wine is no longer wine—that it has been removed entirely from the place of ordinary bread or wine in human culture, and has been given instead a new place, analogous to the first but radically different from it—then so it is. The authority to change meaning is, in the case of culture, the power to change substance.30
3.3. Consecration
We thus arrive, finally and most crucially, at the terminus ad quem of the Eucharistic conversion. What comes to be from ordinary bread and wine is the body and blood of Christ. Here, as in any account of the Eucharist, the mind may well begin to balk. Let us continue, though, along the path we have marked out.
First, what exactly is the point of arrival of the Eucharistic conversion? Does the authoritative tradition of the Church require us to hold that its precise termini ad quem—plural—are Christ’s natural body or flesh and His natural blood? The defined doctrine is that Christ in His entirety is present in every part of that which had been either bread or wine. His body comes to be present by the force of the words “This is my body,” His blood by the force of the words “this is my blood,” but the rest of His person comes to be present in each case through its inseparable connection with the part (DH 1321, 1640). This might be understood as implying that the direct term of the conversion is in the first case Christ’s body exclusive of His blood, and in the second His blood exclusive of His body. This seems to be Aquinas’s interpretation, although he usually refers to the force of the sacrament as a whole rather than of the words alone (ST III, q. 76, aa. 1–4).31 The defined doctrine might also be understood, however, as describing a sacramental synecdoche, which makes present the whole by invoking the part. In this case, the distinction between Christ’s body and His blood would belong to the manner in which the conversion is brought about, rather than to the terminus ad quem itself. On the simplest version of such a view, the direct term of the conversion would not even be Christ’s body and blood as opposed to His soul and divinity; it would simply be Christ, present in and through His human bodiliness, yet in the manner proper to the sacrament rather than in that proper to His human body.32 The space for a cultural account of genuine transubstantiation opens up within this synecdoche, which allows us to ask whether the whole Christ might be the term of the Eucharistic conversion insofar as the mystery of His person undergoes an extension or expansion that is properly sacramental, and thus belongs to the realm of human culture. Through this sacramental overflow of His person, Christ himself would be present in His entirety—the whole in the part, the substance with all its accidents, in the ways already elucidated by Aquinas.
Let us return to the words of Christ Himself. When He says, “This is my body,” what does He mean? On the one hand, to what does the demonstrative “this” refer? On the other, what does He mean when He says that this referent is His body—or rather, His entire self, named by synecdoche from His body? In the context of the upper room and then of the altar, it requires special pleading to maintain that the word “this” refers to anything other than the sensible reality—to that which is in itself blessed, broken, and given. This reveals the weak point in Aquinas’s account, to which Grisez and others have drawn attention (Grisez 2000, pp. 115–17). According to Aquinas’s express words, that which is directly and literally broken and given is not identical to Christ; rather, Christ is somehow contained under this reality as under an appearance that conceals Him from view (ST III, q. 75, a. 5). To be sure, Aquinas holds that in the words of institution, the pronoun “this” begins by signifying the substance of bread, which is a sensible reality through the accidents that flow from its nature (q. 78, a. 5). I have already argued, however, that this move belongs to the more general practice of solving metaphysical problems by logicizing fiat rather than by careful attention to the phenomena. The result is a general inability to say how substances are connected with their accidents, and in particular, why the substance we call bread or wine should be considered a sensible, tangible reality rather than a metaphysician’s shadow.
An extension account such as Grisez’s clearly avoids this difficulty. Kereszty, drawing on the Greek Fathers, attempts to supplement Aquinas’s view in such a way that no extension is required. Unlike Aquinas, however, Kereszty has no clear account of the ontological status of the “remaining empirical properties” of bread and wine. They cannot be nothing but symbols, for they are properties, and properties are beings of certain sorts: beings, then, with essence and existence of their own. Our Lord’s “this” is most naturally taken as referring to these properties as unified in a single, directly sensible reality, a reality that in many respects—though not, I will suggest, in all—continues to resemble bread. He says that “this”—this directly sensible reality—is Himself. It is He in such a way that the term “my body” is particularly appropriate insofar as He comes to be present from the bread, “my blood” insofar as He comes to be present from the wine. Kereszty—like the patristic tradition on which he is drawing—needs an extension account.
Yet to some extent, at least, he is surely right to resist adopting one. Perhaps an extension theory can secure the identity of that to which Jesus points and that which He says it to be. But the identity secured in this way may well be unacceptable on other grounds. “This” cannot be some new part of Christ’s natural body, as Grisez suggests. Christ’s natural body, risen and glorified, exists unchanging in its intrinsic integrity; it neither requires nor admits of such an addition. Nor can the extension be a “third nature” of some sort. Christ, the mediator between God and man, is by nature both divine and human; His place in a Christian theological cosmology neither requires nor admits of any further nature.33 This conviction motivates Kereszty’s difficult suggestion that the remaining empirical properties of bread and wine are nothing at all in themselves, existing only as effective signs of the risen Lord.
To make this theology of symbol ontologically cogent in the case of the Eucharist, however, we need an ontology of cultural realities in general. I have been advocating a fairly straightforward Aristotelian view on which any concrete cultural reality has as its matter one or more natural substances, thus and so arranged, and as its form the place of the reality as a whole within the community or communities to which it belongs. I have further suggested that Christ, as rightful Lord of the universe, holds over all human culture the absolute authority of the suffering and glorified servant, so that He can, by a simple decree, remove the natural substance or substances underlying any concrete cultural reality from the constitutive place of this reality in human culture. We are now trying to see how He can do so in such a way as to give the natural substances in question a radically new place in the life of a human community, a place so intimately connected with Himself that they no longer exist outside the mystery of His own person: a place that renders the words of institution true.
For a first, incomplete attempt to come at the possibility of such a place, let us take our bearings from our primary word for the Eucharistic conversion: “consecration.” In taking ordinary bread and wine and declaring, “This is my body … this is my blood,” Christ removes the concrete realities in His hands not just from their status as bread and wine, but from any cultural role whatsoever definable in terms of a merely human capacity for making meaning. He does so in order to associate these concrete realities so entirely with himself—to consecrate them so completely—that any statement short of identity about how they are connected with Him becomes inadequate.
How could a consecration be so complete? I have no formula whereby to come at an answer quickly; we shall have to work at it. To begin with, at least two things make such a total consecration difficult to understand. First, human culture in general belongs to the condition of the wayfarer. Every cultural reality, however good it may be, still admits of misuse, for it has been made by us and entrusted to us for the task of working out our salvation, which is as yet incomplete. Every cultural reality therefore suffers from a gap between its present existence and the eschatological condition in which God will be all in all. If such a reality is consecrated to God by ordinary human beings, its consecration is in principle incomplete. Second, no other human being has the authority to make a declaration of ownership as radical as Christ makes in instituting the Eucharist. However much we may wish to do so, we cannot identify ourselves with our goods in anything like the way in which He has identified Himself with the consecrated bread and wine. The universal destination of the earth’s goods—God’s gift of them to the human race as a whole—preempts absolute ownership by any merely human individual. We do not even have this sort of authority over our own bodies, which, when the common good requires, we can be commanded to spend in labor or to sacrifice in war.
If we wish to enter into the depths of the Eucharistic consecration, therefore, it may be helpful to begin by noting that Christ’s glorified natural body escapes both these difficulties. He has consecrated it completely, by giving it completely to His brothers and sisters at His Father’s command, and He has received it back glorified. Because He has given it utterly, it is now His to keep giving utterly; it belongs entirely to Him under the Father, without any gap between wish and reality. In the same way, He and only He has, under the Father, complete authority over the goods of the earth. Of these goods, it seems, He has left all but one within the imperfect, sinful power of us His brothers and sisters, on the earthly side of the gap that remains between earth and heaven. Even the water of baptism may be drunk at need, as nothing more than ordinary water temporarily destined for a sacred use.
The sacramental reality that He calls His body and blood, in contrast, He claims entirely for Himself. He has not left it to be marred by the sinfulness that attends our status as wayfarers, but has decreed that in it we shall see Himself and only Himself. This reality is still, through the unchanged natural substances of which it is composed, part of the ordinary world of space and time. It—He—may therefore be neglected and abused. Christ acquired complete authority over His natural body, however, not merely in being raised, but also and indeed first of all on the cross. When His body was broken, His blood poured out, He was made perfect through His sufferings (Heb 2:10). So too, when His sacramental body and blood are neglected, poured out, trampled upon—when they rot silently in a tabernacle buried in the rubble of a war-torn church—He is glorified.
Christ calls His natural body His own—utterly and completely His own—precisely insofar as He has given it away and continues to give it away. Yet the giving of His natural body is now hidden from us by time. Perhaps, then, we can understand His declaration of identity with the most Blessed Sacrament if we can grasp that what He has done, in the first place, is to submit Himself without reserve to the humiliation to which this Sacrament is exposed. When He says, “This is my body; do this in memory of me,” He is saying, “Treat this as you would treat me.” In saying, “Treat this as you would treat me,” He is saying, “I know that you will in fact treat this as you treated my natural body, and I refuse to distance myself even the smallest step from the cruelty, the pettiness, the simple weakness of mind and heart to which you will subject it. I am leaving this to be crucified by you; and henceforth, when you see it slandered and defamed, it shall have no other meaning—and so no other being—than the glory once seen on the cross. This and this alone, of all that you will see along your way, is utterly mine, and so it is myself. I have spoken, and by the very nature of the realities at stake, my word has the power to make it so.”
This analysis, as yet inadequately developed, parallels and perhaps even coincides with Marion’s reflections on the thingliness of Christ as He gives Himself to us in the Eucharist. Rather than trying to defend Eucharistic worship from the charge that it reduces God to a mere object or thing, manipulable and ultimately disposable, Marion reconfigures the charge by leveling it at God himself. In the Eucharist, God completes the self-abasement of His redeeming descent by presenting Himself to us as an object (Rosemann 2005, pp. 234–35). He is precisely to be handled, passed from one person to another, placed in a tiny metal casket and slipped thoughtlessly into the pocket of a well-intentioned but distracted minister to the sick. Only in this way, by becoming food for our bodies, can He reveal and enact His intention to be entirely for us, so that we may be entirely for Him. In a sense, I am suggesting that we fill in a gap in Marion’s analysis by noting that the relatively narrow genus food is situated within the much broader genus thing by way of the intermediate genus made object, or concrete work of culture.34
In saying, “Treat this as you would treat me,” Jesus is altering our culture, creating a new culture with new patterns of action and new meanings. He does so, I have suggested, with an authority and therefore with a power that we can theorize about, but that we can never in this life grasp in its concrete reality. The Eucharist remains a mystery, I submit, not because it stands outside nature, much less contrary to it, but because, as Kereszty suggests, it intensifies our native, human capacity for creative self-giving beyond ordinary human limits. It is an expression of humanity as only the Incarnation can make it, a fruit of the work of those human hands that are also the hands of God. Into this mystery we must yet enter more deeply.
3.4. Cultural Incarnation
Nothing I have said to this point constitutes an adequate approach to the mystery of Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist. Before making another attempt, however, I want to consider some of the theological doors that such an approach, if successful, might serve to open. We have begun to reflect on the possibility of a cultural innovation—a change of meaning, and hence of being—so radical that it exceeds human power altogether. Every cultural innovation, however, belongs essentially to some community. Hence it must somehow require, for its very existence, the acceptance of the community to which it belongs. Yet Marion shows that the Eucharist, unlike other cultural innovations, cannot require acceptance by an already existing community, so as to be measured by the limits thereof. Instead, therefore, Christ’s act of cultural innovation—cultural construction, even—must itself create the community on whose reception it depends, create in this community the disposition to receive it, and so ensure its own existence “until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20)
Here the theological ground is more familiar. Having cultivated the twelve over a period of time, our Lord brings them to the upper room and initiates His gift of Himself to them. He does so by transforming an existing cultural institution, the Paschal supper, into something much more radical, inseparable from the more radical sacrifice He is about to offer on the cross. In receiving the gift of His body—though without in the least understanding it—the twelve and all who respond to their preaching are gathered together in His name, gathered more intimately than any of them had expected. This gathering prepares them, bewildered and only half-willing, to receive His presence in their midst through His gift of the Spirit. Transformed by the Spirit, they return to receive His body anew, in memory of Him and in obedience to His command. And so, through the ages, the God-man creates by the gift of His body and blood the community on whose continued receptivity the gift itself depends. This community is the Church, and the Church’s receptivity is the intention to do, however well or poorly she may understand it, what Christ Himself did. This strange, half-willing community reenacts the reconfiguration of meaning and of being enacted by its founder, but its members can take no credit for doing so. Their ongoing obedience to His command has always occurred mysteriously, in spite of their own protests.
Beyond ecclesiology, such an account is valuable for the light it sheds on the human creation of meaning and of culture. The search for autonomy apart from God that characterizes modern society has crystalized itself in our time in the twin claim to autonomy in the disposition of one’s own body and autonomy in the cultural creation of meaning. It is a blessing that these ideals, insofar as they are actually treated as ideals, are self-limiting and self-defeating. Any person or group that claims such autonomy in practice immediately finds itself without justification, insofar as its own quest for autonomous self-determination proves incompatible with the same quest on the part of other individuals and communities (compare Gen 11:1–9).
In the Eucharist, however, Christ reveals the essential conditions of true autonomy—of complete self-possession, including the complete possession of one’s body—and of the creation of authentic meaning through culture. He thereby stands in judgment, as the suffering servant, over every attempt at self-possession and every attempt to make meaning that falls short of the model He gives us. He offers us this model at the Last Supper, where, in dialogue with the traditions of His people, He creates a concrete work of culture that is transparent to His own love, and that therefore glows with His authority. As a work of culture, the Eucharist is distinct from every natural human body—distinct from each, so as to bring all together by physical giving and receiving. It is, as Marion so strikingly insists, a thing. Yet in it we find Christ himself in His entirety. In it is revealed the condition for true autonomy: to be caught up in the life of the suffering servant, becoming completely one’s own precisely insofar as one gives oneself completely to others. In it we encounter the perfect expression of this autonomy in a freely created work of human hands.
From this point of view, we can now make our way back to the central question. Understood as the definitive site of God’s presence within human culture, the Eucharist is indeed an extension of the Incarnation. It is not, however, an extension de novo, as a new bodily part or a third nature would be. It flows instead, as Kereszty implies, from a divine intensification of the natural human tendency to give body to our hopes and dreams in objects of our own making, and in particular to express our love for others in the things we make for them (Kereszty 2000, pp. 351–52). Without this transcendent gift, in fact, the Incarnation itself would be incomplete, for the Eucharist, as the perfect reception of the Word into human culture, perfects the reception of the Word into human nature. As in the virgin’s womb, moreover, so in the upper room: the Lord creates, in those who do not yet fully understand, the conditions for His own reception, and then far exceeds the measure of their expectations.
In both cases, the definitive site of God’s arrival must be immolated completely. As Kereszty insists, it can no longer have a life independent of Him—can no longer exist except as the site of His presence among us. What this means differs in the two cases, as nature differs from culture. The Word’s reception into human nature means that this individual instance of human nature belongs not to a new human person but precisely to the eternal Word. Mary’s son is not united to her creator; He is her creator. He does not thereby fail to be human, for His divinity is not incompatible with human nature. Bread and wine, however, as cultural realities, are essentially bound to their places within human culture. For them, becoming the definitive site of God’s dwelling is incompatible with remaining bread and wine.
Yet appearances do not deceive. There is nothing here that looks and quacks entirely like a duck without in fact being a duck. One can grasp the meaning, and hence the being, of a cultural reality only by understanding the community to which it belongs. By becoming the source of eternal life for a new, divine community, bread becomes something more than bread, and that which it becomes is manifest to those who have eyes to see it, to just the extent that Christ is manifest as the Word of God in His visible human actions.35 Christ’s actions and words, in fact, in the upper room and on the cross, are not merely extrinsic causes of His presence in the Eucharist. Instead, by giving the Eucharist its originative place within the life of the Church, these words and actions are formally constitutive of the Eucharist. Properly understood, therefore, the Eucharist not only is Christ; it also appears to be precisely what it is. Here too, we may add, Kereszty is correct: by being embedded in the life of a new and divine community through the self-giving of its founder, bread becomes … bread, in a new and divine sense: the bread of angels. Wine becomes the spiritual intoxicant of which the Anima Christi sings.
There is a further, poignant sense in which the Eucharist so understood does not constitute a third nature. As we have always known, Christ’s human nature is more permanent to His person, even in a sense more intrinsic to it, than is the Eucharist. Our Lord’s human nature is His fundamental and permanent way of being among us in our bodiliness, and He will remain present to us in this way through all eternity, after we are raised. The Eucharist, in contrast, is viaticum; it belongs to our status as wayfarers. It is the definitive site of Christ’s presence to us, so long as we still walk in the valley of the shadow of death. It is corruptible, the site of His glory as in the first stage of its revelation, on the cross, and in the end it will pass away. If we cling to it as to Himself—not merely in appearance, but in truth—the body to which we cling is in the first place the one broken by us on the cross. Unlike Christ’s natural, corruptible body, however, the Eucharist will not be raised again a spiritual body. Rather, it is we who will be raised. Within our mortal bodies, the bodily corruption of the Eucharistic Christ is the seed of immortality.
So understood, the Eucharist does constitute an extension of the person of Christ into the midst of our earthly lives. It is Christ, in a way of being that He had not yet acquired when He was being formed in the virgin’s womb, or walking the roads of Galilee before His death. Yet it is not a third nature, nor even a permanent addition to the second. It extends the mystery of His person throughout the human world, claiming that world for the Father precisely by the humiliation it involves. In it He touches in a passing way those who are passing away. The Eucharist is at once as evanescent as all culture this side of the grave, and as real as the One Who has passed beyond the grave.
4. Conclusions
We have been considering the Eucharist as a work of culture: as fully human as it is divine, yet located beyond the limits of ordinary human culture by its emplacement entirely within the mystery of the person of Christ—by, to use the words at last, its personal or hypostatic union with the incarnate Word. I am well aware that to some, this vision of a cultural incarnation will seem a deflationary account of Christ’s real, true, and substantial presence in the Eucharist. Nor is this surprising. My motive, from beginning to end, has been to protect the integrity of our first source of revelation—the created order as a whole—by finding for the Eucharist a more natural place within it. On the resulting account, although the Eucharist remains miraculous in other senses, nothing is in it contrary to nature.
We might also ask, however, whether anything is contrary to nature in the Incarnation as such. To be sure, the virginal conception of Christ seems to have required an extraordinary redirection of the natural order. This, however, is a secondary matter, enacted in order to safeguard the central reality, which is metaphysically compatible with the existence of a human father. When it comes to the central reality, the teaching of the Church has always insisted on the complete integrity—the complete naturalness—of Christ’s humanity. The enfleshment of the Word ruptures the world only insofar as the world is fallen. When we consider creation as a whole, as a historically dynamic reality meant ultimately to be transparent to its creator, the Incarnation is the most natural thing in the world. I am suggesting only that we strive to understand Christ’s Eucharistic coming in a manner that is more deeply consonant with His coming in the Virgin’s womb—right down to the consecration, the setting aside from ordinary human concerns, of the minister, Virgin or priest, through whom His coming occurs.
Even granted the need for a more natural account of transubstantiation, the idea of a genuine cultural embodiment of the Word may still seem strange. Marion’s reflections on the thingliness of Christ in the Eucharist are helpful in this regard. In addition, I have suggested, the emplacement of a work of culture within the person of the Word lies quite concretely beyond our comprehension, for we ourselves cannot unite any work of culture so completely either to ourselves, by appropriation, or to the Lord, by consecration. Only He, the true priest, has such complete disposition of the fruits of the earth and of the works of human hands. Only He has the authority, and therefore the power, to locate them beyond their natural and human origins by uniting them completely with Himself.
If we remain uncomfortable with this account, I now suggest in closing, it may be that we have not yet learned to take seriously one of the following two realities.
On the one hand, we may be inclined to underestimate the ontological importance of cultural realities by comparison with natural ones. Such underestimation is a historical weakness of the Aristotelian tradition, despite the rich resources that this tradition is capable of bringing to bear on the discussion. Our failure to take culture seriously when we are doing metaphysics may also have deeper roots. A concrete work of culture is constituted by its relations to the people through and for whom it exists. We may fail to take such a reality seriously because we consider relationality as such to be a weak, extrinsic, even superficial mode of being. We may fail to recognize, that is, how deeply and how intrinsically beings in general are constituted by their relations—by their places within the larger contexts to which they belong. This too is a historical defect of the Aristotelian tradition, one that I have begun to address elsewhere by arguing that all the attributes of every being known to us are in fact essentially relational (Mirus 2019, pp. 189–98). Perhaps, finally, we underestimate the ontological importance of culture because we do not take seriously, at least as a matter of ontology, the theological truth that the natural order attains the fullness of its own being only to the extent that it is consecrated to God by the human community, through the creation of true culture.
On the other hand, we may be uncomfortable with the preceding account of the Eucharist because we are not inclined to admit the extent of Christ’s authority within and over human culture as a whole. The kingship of Christ is an integral part of the Church’s prayer, but in some quarters today it seems now to be a source of embarrassment. Perhaps we do not take the Incarnation as seriously as we ought. Perhaps we take Christ’s divinity seriously, but still think that it is not quite the thing for Him to behave like a sovereign—even a suffering sovereign—rather than a committee chair.
On either hand, I urge, we must learn to reckon with the transformative power—literal, metaphysical, profound—of the human being, God’s image, and of the One in whom this image is perfected.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Notes
| 1 | I am grateful in particular to my former colleagues Philipp Rosemann and Matthew Walz: to Philipp for his (Rosemann 1996) and his helpful correspondence on this question, and to Matthew for his generous, patient conversation. |
| 2 | Compare Mt 26:26–28, Mk 14:22–24, Lk 22:19–20, Jn 6:32–35, 48–59, as well as (DH 802, 1636, 1651, 1658, 1740) and (ST III, q. 75, a. 1 ad 3; q. 76, a. 1 ad 3; q. 76, a. 5 c.; q. 77, a. 1, a. 7 ad 3; q. 78, a. 5 c. and ad 2). All quotations of scripture are taken from the New American Bible, Revised edition. |
| 3 | Compare (DH 802, 1652) and (ST III, q. 75, a. 2 c., a. 4, a. 8). |
| 4 | When we call God “wise,” for example, the term “wise” signifies “whatever ‘wise’ means in the case of the unknown God Who is the source of human wisdom.” Here the body of (ST I, q. 13, a. 4) is particularly helpful: “The concept signified by a name is the intellect’s conception of the reality signified by the name. But since our intellect has cognition of God from creatures, in order to understand God it forms concepts propoprtioned to the perfections that proceed from God to creatures.” All translations of Aquinas are my own. |
| 5 | See also (De ente, chap. 3). |
| 6 | For the conversion as an orderly sequence having the two substances themselves as its subject, see (ST III, q. 75, a. 4 obj. 1 and ad 1; Brock 2001, pp. 537–40). For the essential role of the accidents in providing the continuity required to speak of a conversion rather than a mere succession, see (Brock 2001, pp. 540–44). |
| 7 | I had originally assumed that Aquinas’s account of the Eucharist suggests the seprability of all accidents from their subjects. Not only would dimensive quantity be separable from the substance of bread, that is, but a human intellect, which Aquinas considers an accident in the category of quality, would be separable from the substance of person to which that intellect belongs. However, there are several indications that this is wrong. First, accidents enter his account of the Eucharist as a way of interpreting the term species, appearance. Second, Aquinas does not in fact say that Christ’s body is contained under the accidents of bread, even though this is clearly implied by the interpretation of species in terms of accidents. He does, however, speak of Christ’s body as contained under the spatial dimensions of bread (ST III, q. 76, a. 3 c. and ad 1, a. 5 c.). Dimensive quantity, that is, seems to be not only the foundation of the other accidents (q. 77, a. 2), but also the basic condition by which corporeal substance is able to “show up” in the world. |
| 8 | Responding to B. F. Brown, John Wippel attributes to Aquinas a more subtle view of our knowledge of substances, which I will discuss below. |
| 9 | Levering’s chapter on transubstantiation (Levering 2005, pp. 115–67) is not aimed at Grisez in particular; however, Levering is aware of Grisez’s concerns, and thinks that he and Brock together have offered an adequate response (p. 142n7). |
| 10 | Aquinas may in fact think of accidents as parts—accidental parts—of the substances to which they belong, or may at least incline toward this view in some contexts (Skrzypek 2019, pp. 67–114). Although I have not fully worked out the implications of this reading, I am inclined to think that it does not resolve but simply relocates the difficulty with which I am concerned. The substance’s form remains distinct from its proper accidents, is still related to these accidents as an efficient cause is related to its effects, and so remains essentially hidden behind them. I thank Michael Gorman for drawing my attention to Skrzypek’s essay. |
| 11 | In the Categories, which seems to be presupposed by Aristotle’s other extant works, hupokeimenon is correlative to to katēgoria. Now usually translated “category” or “predicate,” katēgoria ordinarily signified an accusation or juridical charge: what we now call the predicate of a sentence was therefore the charge or allegation being made about the subject. In the Categories this subject or “underlier” is called a hupokeimenon, and this term is known to have been used for one who is liable to a penalty or an authority, among many other things. The broader sense of hupokeimenon, however, was of something set before one, assumed, or in view. Used spatially, it most often meant not “under” but “adjacent.” See (Liddell et al. 2003, under katēgoria, hupokeimai). |
| 12 | On Wippel’s interpretation of Thomas, “one does not first explicitly discover accidents or accidental being and then reason from them to infer the existence of substantial reality by applying the principle of causality. One first discovers being as such, and only thereafter is one in a position to distinguish therein between substance and accident.” (Wippel 2000, p. 199n4; see also pp. 198–99, 228–29). I am happy to accept this refinement, but do not think it makes a difference to the present discussion. Given the experiential judgment that a concrete material being exists, one can think of the source of this being’s essential unity as existing in and through its manifest attributes, causal powers, and so forth, or as existing behind these things. To take the second route is to arrive at knowledge of a corporeal substance by way of inference. |
| 13 | Compare Aquinas, De veritate, q. 4, a. 1 ad 8; q. 10, a. 1 c. and ad 6. |
| 14 | Compare Aquinas, In IV Sent., d. 12, q. 1, a. 1, ql. 1 ad 1 and ad 2. |
| 15 | See for example (ST III, q. 76, a. 4 ad 1). |
| 16 | For the identity between the form of a living thing and its powers, see for example Aristotle, De anima II.4, 415a14–20; compare De generatione animalium, cited in n19 below. For the unity of the soul as the essential unity of the powers according to their own definitions, see II.2–3, III.12–13. |
| 17 | Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.16, 1040b5–10. |
| 18 | For context and references see (Mirus 2022, pp. 248–49). |
| 19 | For the gradual emergence of the animal’s soul as its body is formed by the nutritive power—but also for the unique, divine origin of intellect—see Aristotle, De generatione animalium II.3, 736a27–b29. |
| 20 | See for example (ST III, q. 75, a. 2 c.). |
| 21 | Levering’s primary topic at this point is the threefold sacramental representation of the Lord’s passion, the unity of the Church, and enjoyment of God Himself in heaven (see, e.g., [ST III, q. 73, a. 4 c.]). He is not, however, suggesting that the sacramental sign is one or all of these events as such, but that it is Christ himself. |
| 22 | For the expression “contained in,” see (ST III, q. 65, a. 3 c., q. 73, a. 5 c., q. 73, a. 6 c., q. 74, a. 3 s.c., q. 75, a. 1 c., q. 76, a. 1 ad 3). For “contained under,” see (q. 75, a. 8 c.; q. 76, a. 1 c. and ad 2; q. 76, a. 6 c., q. 77, a. 8 ad 3; q. 78, a. 5 c. and ad 2). |
| 23 | For citations and further discussion see (Kereszty 2004, p. 113). Here is Betz, in Kereszty’s translation: “According to the view of the ancient world all things are determined in their suchness [So-sein] by the power that dominates them. If, then, the Logos takes over the gifts of bread and wine at the Last Supper and appropriates, controls, and penetrates them, he transforms their suchness by his power and in his own way.” (Betz 1961, p. 140). Damascene writes that “just as, in the order of nature, … bread and wine and water … are changed into the body and blood of the one who eats and drinks them, and do not become a different body from the one he had earlier, so … bread and wine and water, through the invocation and visitation of the Holy Spirit, are remade into the body and blood of Christ, and they are not two, but one and the same.” A few lines later, however, he continues, “Let us honor it in all purity, both of soul and of body, for it is twofold. … The bread of communion is not plain bread, but united to divinity; and a body united to divinity is not one nature, but [there is] one of the body and another of the divinity united to it, so that the compound is not one nature but two.” (Damascene 1973, bk. IV, chap. 13; translation mine). |
| 24 | Compare (Kereszty 2000, p. 352): “In the divine act of symbolic self-communication the symbolised and the symbol become fundamentally identical while remaining distinct on the empirical level: Christ is not the empirical reality of bread and wine.” This seems to be an authentic interpretation of Aquinas’s view. |
| 25 | OED Online, under “bread, n., 1.a,” https://www.oed.com/dictionary/bread_n (accessed on 13 March 2026); “wine, n. (1), 1.b,” https://www.oed.com/dictionary/wine_n1 (accessed on 13 March 2026). |
| 26 | With the definition of “bread” compare Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. VIII, chap. 4; with that of “wine” compare the same book, chap. 2. |
| 27 | In terms of contemporary art, we might begin to characterize the place of the berries within human culture by describing them as found objects. It is important to the divinum commercium that bread and wine are not highly processed or elaborately prepared; their natural origin in wheat, water, and grapes is readily apparent, and their production is relatively simple, so that they remain close to found objects. The significance of the found object as such lies in its origin outside the intention of the one whose finding constitutes it as a found object—an origin for which the finder may be grateful, and to which he must adjust his own intentions. |
| 28 | The use of accidens by the Council of Constance and the Roman Catechism is both exceptional and instructive. From Constance we have the condemnation, without further context, of two theses from John Wycliffe: “The material substance of bread, and likewise the material substance of wine, remain in the sacrament of the altar,” and “The accidents of bread do not persist without subject (sine subiecto) in that sacrament” (DH 1151–52; translations mine). As the Roman Catechism will demonstrate, the second of these theses receives its relevance entirely from the first. In the brief condemnation of Wycliffe, moreover, the phrase sine subiecto may be translated quite naturally as “without their subject,” that is, without the substance of bread. The Catechism—in rather striking contrast with the definitions of Trent, which employ only species—is more explicit: the sensible accidents of bread and wine “exist without anything underlying them” (pt. 2, chap. 4, § 26); they “inhere in no substance, but stand firmly together in themselves, … supported by nothing else” (§ 45). However, this thesis about accidents is presented in the context of two prior theses, namely that the body of Christ is contained in the Eucharist and that the substance of bread and of wine does not remain in it (§ 26). Each of these two is presented with support from Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, and the teaching of councils and popes (§§ 28–30, 38–39). The thesis about accidents, in contrast, is presented briefly as a metphysical consequence of the preceding two, without any direct support from the sources of revelation or the magisterium. (Catholic Church 1905; translations mine). |
| 29 | In terms drawn from Aquinas, we might say that the particular determinations of the natural law that hold contingently for a particular community as a matter of human law depend for their validity on their compatibility with the first principles of the natural law that we receive from God (ST I-II, q. 95, a. 2; q. 96, a. 4). |
| 30 | The restriction of this principle to cultural realities is of course crucial. Although our own knowledge of natural things has cultural as well as natural dimensions, the things themselves are what they are irrespective of the contingent places they may occupy in human culture. It is obviously incoherent to speak of conferring a new essence on a natural being in the absence of any natural change. |
| 31 | Thomas says that if the Eucharist had been celebrated while Christ was in the tomb, His body would have been present under the appearance of bread without His blood (ST III, q. 76, a. 2 c.). I do not think this counterfactual belongs to the deposit of faith, and am inclined to think that such a hypothetical celebration of the Eucharist falls outside the scope of Christ’s intention in instituting it. |
| 32 | Compare (ST III, q. 81, a. 4). |
| 33 | I am grateful to the late Fr. Roch Kereszty for his forceful insistence on this point, and for his kindness in reading and discussing my earliest attempt to work out the matter of this essay. |
| 34 | Analysis by genus and difference is seldom neat, particularly in human affairs. A made object is both a thing and a work of culture, and these genera overlap only partially: rocks are things but not works of culture, and mathematical theories are works of culture but not things. |
| 35 | This account is importantly different from Aquinas’s response to the question concerning deception: on his view (ST III, q. 75, a. 1 c., a. 5 ad 2), we learn by faith that in the Eucharist appearance and reality are radically divergent. On the present view, the senses accurately testify that the natural substances of which bread and wine are materially constituted remain, and the historical and liturgical contexts accurately testify that the cultural locations by which bread and wine are formally constituted have been replaced. |
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