DeoOmnisGloria.com

The Mediaevals on the Nature of the Real Presence

Considering the discussion many of you have entered into regarding the article “The Eucharist in the Age of the Fathers” I thought it would be appropriate to post the next chapter from Nichols' book. I believe that in any historical-theological study we owe it to ourselves to look at the big picture. It was for this reason that I recommended Nichols’ book, The Holy Eucharist: From The New Testament to Pope John Paul II. Yet knowing the general unavailability of this book and the fact that many of you will not actually attempt to purchase it, I decided to go ahead and post the next chapter. Currently much of my thought is bent upon the Eucharist, as my friend Darius told me in his last days…”it is the only thing that matters.” This is the pivotal teaching…the Eucharist must be…for to Catholics (and Orthodox) the Eucharist is Christ, “the source and the summit of Christian life” (CCC 1324). So let us turn once again to the wisdom of Aidan Nichols, a man who has truly attempted to treat this Subject with care and consideration.

The Mediaevals on the Nature of the Real Presence

In considering the development of eucharistic doctrine in the Latin Church between the age of the Fathers and the classical moment of St. Thomas, we encounter two fundamental issues. First, what is the mode of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist? Here we shall find maximalists and minimalists, or if you will, literalists and symbolists, in debate sometimes enlightening, sometimes merely, alas, acrimonious, until, with the emergence of the concept of transubstantiation, a satisfactory resolution is achieved. Although transubstantiation enters the conciliar tradition with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, it flowers into theological light with the tertia pars of Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, written in 1272. The second issue occupying the centre of the stage in the early mediaeval period concerns the purpose, aim or salvific rationale of the Eucharist. As the Cappadocians had already realised, the real presence cannot be left as a bare metaphysical fact. It must possess its own ‘finality’, its own intrinsic purpose within the economy of salvation. As we shall see in the next chapter, two views of what this purpose might be existed side by side. One concentrated on the mystical aspect of the Eucharist, and saw its purpose as the achieving of spiritual union between Christ and the believer. The other emphasised the ecclesial dimension, locating the finality of the presence in the unification of the whole Church by charity. These two perspectives are conveniently brought together in Thomas’ assertion that the ultimate reference of the Eucharist is the mystical unity of the Church of Christ – thus showing that the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ perspectives are not rivals or competitors but complement each other.

Paschasius and Ratramnus

But our task in this chapter is to investigate the developing discussion in the early mediaeval Church on the nature of the real presence. The debate’s starting-point may be dated to around 830 when a monk-theologian of the Benedictine abbey of Corbie in eastern France, Paschasius Radbert (c. 790-865), was asked to produce a comprehensive exposition of the Eucharist for the use of Benedictine missionaries among the Saxon tribes of Germany. In his De corpore et sanguine Domini, Paschasius insisted that the body of Christ present in the Eucharist is the self-same body of Mary. As an antiphon set to music by numerous later composers in the Church would put it, in laudatory acclamation of this identity: Ave verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine, ‘Hail true body, born of Mary the Virgin’. (1) The relation between the Lord’s eucharistic body and his historical (and so biological) body is one not simply of continuity but of essential sameness. Paschasius considers the objection that when Christ instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper he had not yet suffered and died. The eucharistic body could not, therefore, be his historical body. He responds in the manner of all adroit controversialists. Rather than answering the question in its own terms, he confronts the objector with a problem inherent in the contrary position. Had Christ waited until after the Resurrection to give himself in the Eucharist in bodily form

the heretics would have said that Christ is now incorruptible and located in heaven and that therefore his flesh cannot be eaten on earth by the faithful. (2)

Paschasius’ sources were the realistic passages about the presence in the Fathers. But precisely because of his rich patristic culture, typical of the Carolingian ‘rebirth of studies’, he was also acutely aware of the symbolist passages also. How could the Fathers simultaneously call the Eucharist veritas, ‘reality’, and figura, ‘a figure’? Paschasius explains that the Eucharist is both figure and reality: while its appearance is bread and wine, its truth is the presence of Christ’s body and blood, even though these are received in the sacrament by faith. For Paschasius, the real presence is absolutely indispensable for the function of this sacrament, which is to unite believers with the God-man in his very reality. Though Paschasius wisely rejected the notion that the Lord’s body and blood were actually digested like ordinary food, individual phrases in his treatise were open to misunderstanding in that offensive way. Moreover, he would have had some difficulty in avoiding this danger completely, since he seems to have held that only by a miracle affecting the normal working of our senses do we not see on the altar the physical humanity of the Word, God, in this manner, graciously preventing us from being overwhelmed by the Eucharist’s awesome greatness.

When in some few years’ time his treatise was presented to the Carolingian emperor Charles the Bald, its ultra-realist account of the eucharistic presence gained it a mixed reception among the court intelligentsia. Another black monk theologian, Ratramnus, wrote a reply which centred on two questions. First, do the faithful receive the body and blood of Christ ‘in a mystery’, in mysterio, or ‘in very truth’, inveritate? (3) Secondly, is this the same body and blood as that which Mary bore? According to Ratramnus, the Eucharist is, in terms of the contrast he himself has posed, a ‘mystery’ that is, on his own definition:

an action which exhibits one thing outwardly to the human senses and proclaims another thing inwardly to the minds of the faithful. (4)

Therefore, for him, it cannot be, in the alternative term of his couplet, ‘truth’, or what he calls:

a representation of clear fact, not obscured by any shadowy images. (5)

Ratramnus’ position has been summed up by saying that he believed the Eucharist to be in the order of practical reality what a metaphor is in the order of language – the expression of one reality by reference to another reality quite distinct from it. If we say that, for instance, Richard I of England was ‘a lion for bravery’, we are claiming that one reality – lion-ness, in one of its (presumably well-founded) attributes – was expressed in another reality quite distinct from itself, name Richard Coeur de Lion. And just as through their leonine qualities lions have some relation to brave men, so – returning now to the Eucharist – the historical body of Jesus bears some relation (via, presumably, the spiritual reality of the glorified Christ) to the consecrated elements. That licenses us to call those elements ‘the body and blood of Christ’, but we must be candid in conceding the distinct autonomy of the two realities concerned. For Ratramnus, the consecrated elements are an enacted metaphor. They are an evocation in ritual of how the heavenly Christ feeds believers spiritually with his own life.

And this furnishes Ratramnus with the reply to his second question. The body of Christ which Mary bore cannot be that body of Christ which is present in the Eucharist. The first was an empirical body, made up of bones, nerves, flesh; the second is an interior spiritual reality expressed in an exterior physical sign. By interpreting the sometimes ambiguous evidence of the patristic tradition after his preferred fashion, Ratramnus came to conclusions much different from those of Paschasius.

Did Ratramnus simply deny the real presence? His repeated claim that, after the eucharistic consecration, ‘no change has taken place’, (6) may simply mean: no change that could – even in principle – be perceived by the senses. He set out to combat the Paschasian notion of a supernatural transformation of the bread and wine extending to their appearances, veiled though this be to our sensory perception; in pruning back a theological excess, he cut too deep into the sap-bearing trunk of the Church’s eucharistic faith.

Lanfranc and Berengar

A more satisfactory theology of the presence emerges in the course of the eleventh century. Grit for the pearl was provided around 1040 by a French priest, Berengar (c. 1010-1088), archdeacon of Tours, who revived Ratramnus’ ideas in the new context of Aristotelian logic, the up-and-coming philosophical tool of the age. Berengar’s contribution to eucharistic theology lay in obliging his critics to clarify their own view. Protected against hostile churchmen by his bishop, as well as his secular employer the Count of Anjou, Berengar found the Papacy more accommodating – at any rate at first. Pope Leo IX, the first of the great reforming popes from north of the Alps, attempted to arrange a public debate to discuss the issues, but this initiative was vetoed by the French king. The pope, accordingly, offered as an interim measure a simple compromise formula drawn up by Berengar himself. In 1059, however, the new Pope Nicholas II, under pressure from Norman theologians who considered Berengar little less than an heresiarch in the making, allowed his legate, Humbert of Silva Candida – whose intemperate excommunication of the Byzantine patriarch Michael Kerullarios had just precipitated an if not the Eastern schism – to improve on Berengar a quite draconian oath which revived Paschasius’ ultra-realism in its sharpest form.

The bread and wine which are laid on the altar [so the oath ran] are after the consecration not only a sacrament. They are also the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and they are physically taken up and broken in the hands of the priest and crushed by the teeth of the faithful not only sacramentally but in truth. (7)

This formula, a source of some embarrassment to orthodox divines since, was based on an eighth-century gloss on the text of Augustine’s homilies on the Gospel of St. John. In his comments on John 6, Augustine had volunteered the judgment that ‘the man who is not in Christ and Christ in him’ certainly does not eat his flesh and drink his blood. To this the glossator added:

even if he physically and visibly crush with his teeth the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ.

The gloss could claim a certain exegetical foundation for its language. John’s verb here for ‘to eat’, trogein, is exceptionally realistic (and might be translated ‘to crunch’). But what is crushed according to the gloss are the sacramental elements, whereas in the oath it is Christ’s body itself. Understandably unhappy with the outcome, Berengar repudiated the oath on return to France from Rome, though giving as reason its being taken under duress.

On Pope Nicholas’ death in 1061 his successor, Alexander II, showed no interest in Berengar’s case, but in 1063 the latter was confronted by a new adversary. This was Abbot Lanfranc of Bec, later to be Archbishop of Canterbury. (8) Although Lanfranc took the title of Paschasius’ treatise as his own, his work showed a notable theological advance on his monastic predecessor. He found his cue in his study of Ambrose. In the De sacramentis, Ambrose had pointed out that if Christ, as the second person of the Holy Trinity, can create from nothing, then he must also have power to bring it about that

things that do exist should continue in being or be changed into something else. (9)

In his comments on this text, Lanfranc proposed for the first time the idea of transubstantiation: the conversion of the substance, but not the accidents, of bread and wine, in the substance of Christ’s being.

The material objects on the Lord’s Table which God sanctifies through the priest are – by the agency of God’s power – indefinably, wondrously, in a way beyond our understanding, converted to the body of Christ in their being. Their outward appearances and certain other qualities remain unchanged, so that those who receive them are not shocked by the naked flesh and blood, and so that believers may receive the greater rewards of faith. What we receive is the very body which was born of the Virgin, and yet it is not. It is, in respect of its being (essentia) and the characteristics and power of its true nature; it is not if you look at the outward appearance (species) of the bread and wine. (10)

Berengar’s reply to Lanfranc, the De sacra Coena, was shrewd. For Lanfranc, or so Berengar maintained, the sacrament has ceased to be a sign, pointing beyond itself. By insisting that the visible forms of bread and wine are metaphysically combined with the invisible reality of Jesus Christ, Lanfranc had removed the Eucharist from the sacramental order. (11)

For a second time, the affair came to the ears of Church authority. In 1079 Pope Gregory VII, Hildebrand, under criticism for doctrinal laxity from the German episcopate, moved to act in the Berengar case. Summoned again to Rome, Berengar accepted, with some reluctance, a new oath, which included a vital phrase for the future in the words ‘substantially converted’. It read:

I, Berengar, believe with my heart and confess with my mouth that the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are changed in their substance (substantialiter converti) into the true flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, by the Holy Prayer and the words of our Redeemer. They are thus, after consecration, the true body of Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, which was offered, and hung on the Cross, for the salvation of the world, and which sits on the right hand of the Father, and the real blood of Christ, which was shed from his side – and they are this, not only by virtue of the sign and the power of this sacrament, but in their peculiar nature and their substantial reality. (12)

Berengar’s difficulties with this second oath revolved around the crucial phrase ‘substantially converted’. As to those words, by his own account, he could only sign with grave mental reservations. Professor Henry Chadwick has shown that Berengar remained obdurate in his conviction that to surrender belief in the natural reality of the bread and wine, after the consecratory prayer, is to lose access to the signs which give access to Christ’s saving reality. This was a position which could claim some semblance of authority from Augustine; Berengar strengthened it by the logical consideration that to speak of ‘consecrated bread and wine’ must imply that bread and wine survive in being consecrated. Their consecration consists not in the passing away of their being but in its elevation ‘to be something better’, in melius - a phrase Berengar borrowed from Augustine on the Incarnation. (13)

Sadly, he had found the pope weak, despite Gregory’s expression of trust in Berengar’s legitimate place within the Augustinian tradition and a vision in which the Blessed Virgin had instructed the pope not to require of Berengar any dogma going beyond authoritative scripturae. (14)

Berengar died edifyingly, as a hermit on an island in the Loire. Before leaving the Berengarian controversy, however, we should note two things. First, there is an ambivalence in his writings, or what remains of them, comparable to the difficulties which doctrinal historians have found in the assessment of Ratramnus. Sometimes he affirms a real presence of Christ, while denying that this involves the outright conversion of the elements into Christ’s body and blood – this will be, later, the moderate Reformation position of Luther. At other times, he anticipates such ‘left-wing’ Reformation teaching as that of Zwingli, saying, in effect, that the consecrated elements are truly identical with the Lord’s being. But on other occasions, they ascribe to the suffering and glorified person of the Saviour in the Eucharist what can only be properly attributed to the sacramental species. Still, it is worth bearing in mind here the judicious comment of Darwell Stone:

While there is no doubt [wrote the High Anglican historian of eucharistic doctrine] that carnal tendencies existed both in language and in thought, the probability must not be forgotten that such phrases as ‘the real body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are held and broken by the hands of the priest and crushed by the teeth of the faithful’ were used by many as clumsy ways of expressing the conviction that the sacrament which is held and broken and crushed is the body and blood of Christ. (15)

The careless formulation of the oath of 1059 would have an appeal in some unexpected quarters. Luther, attracted, no doubt, by language he found not so much clumsy as vigorous and earthy, praised the oath for its ruling out of a ‘double manducation’ – something unacceptably dualist in the Saxon Reformer’s eyes. To feed on the elements physically by the body and on Christ spiritually by the soul is to divide what God, in creating us, and nourishing us with the holy sacrament, has united.

During the next century, the twelfth, the conviction settles over the theological community that the most appropriate term for the wonderful change which the elements, in the economies of the Son and the Spirit, undergo in the Liturgy is ‘substantial conversion’ or ‘transubstantiation’. It is this conviction which the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, convoked and ratified by Pope Innocent III, would express in its own eucharistic teaching.

There is one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is in a state of salvation. In this Church, Jesus Christ himself is both priest and sacrifice; and his body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body, and the wine into the blood, by the power of God, so that, to effect the mystery of unity, we ourselves receive of that which is his, what he himself received of that which is ours. (16)

Chadwick has pointed out the touch of paradox in the circumstance that this doctrine of a change of metaphysical substance arose from the need to avert Humbert’s ‘materialistic and naturalistic interpretation of eucharistic change and reception’, so that the safeguarding, in Latin Christendom, of a genuinely spiritual view of the Eucharist fell to two popes – Gregory VII and Innocent III – who have ‘commonly enjoyed a distinguished place in Protestant demonology and myth’. (17) We shall not be far wrong in finding additionally in these words a plea to separated Western Christians to find in the dogma of transubstantiation an equilibrium and repose amidst the clashing possibilities which eucharistic thinking has engendered.

The theology of Thomas

The classic account of that dogma in Latin Christian thought awaits us in questions 73 to 78 of the tertia pars of Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. From what we have seen of the Paschasian and Berengarian controversies, it will not surprise us to discover that Thomas opens his discussion of the presence by asking whether Christ’s body is in this sacrament secundum veritatem, ‘really and truly’, or only secundum figuram, ‘in a figurative way’. Citing various Church Fathers, Thomas opts for the former, since, as he remarks, such a ‘real’ presence fits more appropriately with the New Covenant, with the ‘perfection’ (as he calls it) of the Christian dispensation. (18) And he offers a reasoned justification for why this is so.

First, the Old Testament already had a figurative expression of the Passion of Christ. Its ritual sacrifices prefigured the death of the true Lamb. Rightly, then, the sacrifice of the New Law instituted by Christ should have aliquid plus, ‘something more’, than that. Appropriately, it contains Christ himself who suffered for us, and that not merely in a token (signification) but in actual reality as well. Secondly, such a real presence, Thomas argues better befits the charity of Christ which led him to take a human body for our sakes at the Incarnation. It is in the highest degree proper to friendship, Thomas explains, that friends should live together. They should share that common life which bodily communication makes possible. In heaven, we shall see Christ, the King, in his beauty; but even here on our pilgrimage, he has not left us without his bodily presence. So Thomas calls this sacrament since it joins Christ and ourselves so intimately, signum maximae caritatis, ‘the sign of the greatest possible charity’, and nostrae spei sublevamentum, the ‘arousal of our hope’. Thirdly, for Christ to be really present in his body and blood is more appropriate to the nature of Christian faith which bears not only on Christ’s Godhead but also on his manhood. The divine Word in whom we put our faith is also the human Jesus, for Jesus’ embodied humanity is the ‘conjoined instrument’ of the Word in our salvation.

Probably by coincidence, Thomas touches on Berengar’s weightiest objection to eucharistic realism: by denying that Christ is present symbolically in the Eucharist do we not remove it from the order of signs, and so overthrow its nature as a sacrament? Thomas replies, in effect, that signs may have different ways of signifying, diverse modes in which they act as signs. The sacramental signs at large already differ from natural signs because they effect or bring about what they represent. In the Eucharist we have something else again: Christ is present there in the mode proper to this unique sacrament, which is a sign that not only brings about what it represents but also contains it.

Granted, then, that the body of Christ is truly present in this sacrament, do the substances of bread and wine also endure there after the consecration? (19) The word ‘substance’ in this context had come down to Thomas, as we have seen, from the dogmatic tradition – Lanfranc to Lateran IV. It was also familiar to his readers from the philosophy they had studied in the liberal arts courses of the mediaeval schools. But for us today, a word about its import is desirable.

Thomas possesses a rich philosophical vocabulary for describing, or analyzing, the concrete structure of reality, the way things are. Three of the most important key words are: esse, substantia, and accidentia. Accidents for mediaeval philosophy are not, evidently, what we mean in everyday speech today: events in the human world not willed by any human agent, like a child catching rabies, or King’s Cross underground station catching fire. For Thomas, accidents are those aspects of reality which require for their existence a created ground which is other than themselves. Thus, while the redness of a red apple certainly exists, it only exists by inhering in the apple itself. Accidents are features of reality that have no visible means of support unless they find it in some other aspect of reality which has the ontological solidity that they lack. And this second aspect of reality Thomas calls substance. Substance is a concrete reality in so far as it needs no other created ground than itself. The desk on which I am writing is substantial because it is not parasitic on any other concrete reality for its existence. It does not inhere in anything, though something – for instance, oblong-shapedness, hardness, brownness – inheres in it. It is typical of substances, according to Thomas, that they enjoy a certain autonomy, independence or self-sufficiency within the created order. However, such autonomy is only relative, for ultimately, just as accidents require grounding in substance, so substance requires grounding in esse, usually translated the ‘act of being’. Precisely by virtue of being created, the world, composed as it is of substances with their accidents, is a world which only endures because it constantly receives being. God who is infinite actuality, actus purus, communicates being, the act of being, to creatures as the deepest foundation of their existence. So as to draw attention to the fact that substances with their accidents are dependent for their own ground on God, Thomas describes them as entia, ‘be-ings’, from the verbal participle of esse, ens: finite participations in the infinite esse or act of being which God, as Creator, is.

In actual experience, the order in which we come to grasp reality follows the sequence in which I have treated these topics: first accidents, then substances, finally being. What we encounter in the world is, in the first place, the myriad forms of what is seen, heard, touched, tested, but through this sensuous richness and variety the human mind discerns the ordered inter-relation of substances which ground these accidents. The mind discovers intelligible patterns in the world, patterns which coincide with distinct concrete things, and enable them to possess significance in their own right. Through crustiness, doughiness, crispy-brownness or sometimes flabby whiteness I find bread: my intelligence meets an intelligibility which corresponds to the mind’s most natural question, What is it? Only by reflecting rationally on the conditions of possibility for such substances, presented to me through their accidents, do I reach the third stage, the stage of esse, by asking how it is possible for something which does not have within it its own ground of being to exist.

Well, then, do the substances of bread and wine remain in this sacrament after the consecration? Thomas replies that such co-existence of Christ’s real presence with the substance of bread and wine is impossible. He argues that Christ’s body can only come to be in this sacrament by one of two ways. Either it is brought in from outside, or something already there is changed into it. But there can be no question of Christ’s body moving through space: among many difficulties, this would entail that body ceasing to be in heaven. (20) This leaves only the possibility that the substance of bread changes into it: and this explains why Christ said not ‘Here is my body’ but ‘This is my body’, for the latter proposition would be false were the substance of bread still present. Moreover, the worship the Church gives this sacrament would be altogether misguided if the consecrated elements contained a created substance which ought not to receive adoration.

This change (conversion) of the substance of bread into the substance of Christ’s body must be counted omnino supernaturalis, ‘entirely beyond the powers of nature’. (21) It is brought about sheerly through the power of God. Unlike God, a created agent, such as ourselves, or an earthquake, has only a limited range of action. A created agent can change reality only in the sense of changing the form of some reality: the distinctive organization of matter which makes something an intelligible kind of something with characteristic capacities, whether active or passive. Such a ‘formal change’ is not what happens in the eucharistic conversion. To have some inkling of what does happen there, we must remember that God is infinite actuality and that, accordingly, his actions extends, as Thomas puts it, ‘to the whole being of a thing’. God is able to bring about a conversio totius entis, a transformation of the way it participates in esse so as to be this individual substance and not that.

The author of being is able to change that which is being in the one into that which is being in the other by taking away what kept this from being that. (22)

Since such a change is unique, we give it a name all its own: transubstantiation.

For St. Thomas, the moment when this real presence is achieved in the offering of the Church comes when the words of institution of the Eucharist, as given in the Gospels from the lips of Christ, are repeated, in the liturgical drama, by the celebrating priest. (23) For some students of the history of the liturgy, Thomas’ clear-cut position on this point (he remarks that the rest of the canon of the Mass is unnecessary for the consecration, though a celebrant who omitted all else would sin gravely in failing to observe the rite of the Church) derives from the internal demands of the doctrine of transubstantiation itself. Transubstantiation, it may be said, entails an instantaneous transformation of the gifts. On the other hand, Aquinas may well have been reacting to the somewhat confused and implausible alternative positions taken up by a number of his predecessors: Amalarius of Metz, for example, seems to have considered that the Our Father could consecrate, while the prayer of the Roman liturgy at the Fraction, ‘This commingling and consecration’ may have given rise to misunderstandings in others. (24) Still, though Thomas did not advert to the importance of the epiklesis in the East, or of the epiklesis-like prayers in the Roman liturgy of his day, he by no means neglected the role of the Holy Spirit in the consecration. (25) Interpreting Augustine, he insists that for the body of Christ to be present in the Eucharist ‘spiritually’ does not mean in ‘mystical signification’ alone, but rather ‘invisibly and through the power of the Spirit’. (26) A little later in his treatment of the presence in the Summa Theologiae, he stresses that, at the consecration, bread is changed into Christ’s body ‘by the power of the Spirit alone’. (27) Perhaps the best adjudication of the whole consecration question, so controverted in later Catholic-Orthodox polemic, is to say that eucharistic transformation takes place at the words of institution (the Latin stress) but not as in any way separated from their context in the entire eucharistic prayer which should itself be regarded as ‘epicletic’ in character (so picking up the Greek emphasis). (28)

The way in which Christ exists in this sacrament as a result of this ‘wonderful conversion’ is grasped only by the uncreated mind of God. But, Thomas thinks, the glorified minds of angels and of human beings can come to some understanding of it in heaven through a sharing in God’s own knowledge of himself. For homo viator, man on pilgrimage, by contrast, it can be known only through faith, on the authority of the Word of God revealing. (29) Thomas rarely, if ever, calls the conversion a miracle. Its closest analogy lies not with miracles but with the act of creation. Bringing the body of Christ out of bread should be compared to the original creative act bringing being out of non-being, rather than to a modification of the laws of nature. What can be called miraculous, however, is the way in which God preserves the accidents of bread and wine in being even when the substance in which they inhered is no longer present. (30) For the accidents are really present in the Eucharist, just as is the substance of Christ’s body. Some of Thomas’ contemporaries wondered whether the accidents were truly there: a hang-over from the ultra-realism of Paschasius and Humbert. Thomas has to deal with an objector who maintains that the accidents do not genuinely nourish but only refresh by bringing about a change of feeling in the recipient, as when a person feels stronger from the very smell of food or euphoric at the smell of wine. But Thomas gives them the same active characteristic which bread and wine everywhere possess: were a man to consume a large quantity of consecrated hosts, he remarks, robustly, he could be kept going nutritionally for a long time. (31)

Finally Thomas raises and answers one or two other important matters handed down on the agenda of the past. First of all, what is meant by calling the blessed sacrament corpus Christi, the body of Christ? Though using the phrase ‘the body of Christ’ for the sacrament, Thomas insists that we have to do here with totus Christus, ‘the whole Christ’ – not in Augustine’s sense of the phrase, the head with his members but in the sense of Christ’s total being, divinity and humanity. (32) While, as a result of the sacramental sign, Christ’s body and blood are present as the ‘term of the conversion’, nevertheless they cannot in reality be separated from Christ’s soul and his Godhead. It is only by an act of our minds that we distinguish these realities that are actually found together. Thomas provides a convenient phrase for this state of affairs: presence ‘by natural concomitance’. It follows that the whole Christ is found under either species.

Moreover, he is present under each and every part of the appearance of bread and wine. The dimensions of Christ’s body are in this sacrament not in the way that is normal for dimensions to be, but in the way that is natural for substance to be, and the whole nature of any substance is given to us under any part of the dimensions that contain it. (33) The whole nature of bread is in a crumb, as in a loaf. For Thomas, our Lord is not present ‘locally’ in his sacrament. He does not occupy the space taken up by its species; he does not move when the species are elevated liturgically in the Mass, or carried in a pyx to the sick, or raised processionally in the monstrance on the feast of Corpus Christi.

Nor is he directly subject in the sacrament to any other kind of change. When the species cease to be, the body of Christ ceases to be under them, not because the body of Christ in any way depends on them, but because the relation between the body of Christ and the species has ceased to be. (35) In the same way, Thomas observes, God ceases to be Lord of some created thing when that thing has ceased to exist: the change takes place not in God but in the creature. The Lord’s body, being glorified, is beyond all change, or anything that we may do to it. The fraction - pace the first oath imposed on Berengar – takes place in the accidents alone. Yet, since the sacramental species are the sign of the real body of Christ so their fraction is the sign of our Lord’s Passion which he endured in his broken body on Golgotha. (36)

What, in conclusion, may be the status of the language of transubstantiation today? In a famous phrase, the Council of Trent called the word a ‘most appropriate’ one for this wonderful change, (37) and that comment has suggested to some a willingness on the Council’s part to leave open the door for other hopeful candidates to enter. Whether as a matter of historical fact this is so may be doubted, for the Council made the idiom its own in describing the conversions taking place vere, realiter, substantialiter. (38) Nevertheless, it is true that, in principle, a Council’s formulations of the Church’s faith may be transposed into other conceptualities if they can be or need be. It can be argued, though, that the metaphysical analysis found in the concept of transubstantiation derives from questions about the world so fundamental that they are pervasive in every culture, and built into the fabric of human rationality itself. No one is rational who cannot ask, What is it? or see the meaning of that question. All of this leaves untouched, however, the purpose of the real presence, which is addressed in chapter 4.
______________________________________________________________________
1. Cf. Paschasius, De corpore et sanguine Domini 1.
2. Ibid. 18.
3. Ratramnus, De corpore et sanguine Domini 5.
4. Ibid. 9,10.
5. Ibid. 7,8.
6. E.g. ibid. 54.
7. Cited Lanfranc, De corpore et sanguine Domini 2.
8. M. Gibson, in her Lanfranc of Bec (Oxford 1978) ascribes Lanfranc’s motivation to loyalty to the memory of Leo IX and Humbert. But he also represented the ‘Norman orthodoxy’, which in the 1050s, had raised up against Berengar his earliest opponents: three monks of the ducal monastery of Fecamp – Abbot John, in his Confessio fidei, his cross-bearer Durand of Troarn, and Archbishop Mauritius, convener of a synod which offered a eucharistic confession of faith: ibid. p. 65.
9. De sacramentis 43; 54.
10.Lanfranc, De corpore et sanguine Domini 18,19.
11. Now edited by R.B.C Huygens as Beringerius Turonensis, Rescriptum contra Lanfrannum (Turnabout 1988, = Corpus Christianorum, continuatio medievalis 84).
12. D.-S. 700: the work of Alberic of Monte Cassino.
13. Tractates on John, 26, 18.
14. H. Chadwick, ‘Ego Berengarius’, Journal of Theological Studies NS 40, 2 (1989), p. 434.
15. D. Stone, History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, op. cit. I. p. 258.
16. D.-S. 802.
17. ‘Ego Berengarius’, art. Cit. p. 442.
18. Summa Theologiae IIIa., q.75. a.1.
19. Ibid. q.75, a.2.
20. A claim is made to resolve these difficulties, using modern physics, in J.A. O’Driscoll, SM ‘The Reality of the Real Presence’, Downside Review 93, 312 (July 1975). But the traditional view – for it is echoed in the East by Damascene, De fide orthodoxa IV. 13, as it is stated in the West by Thomas, was re-instated by W.M. Gordon who wrote by way of reply:

The true movement…in the sacrament is best imagined not by the descent of Christ into countless hosts but by the converging ascent of the many faithful to the one Christ. In such a vision, the laws of the temporal order and mundane existence no longer obtain; measure, distance, speed are not relevant here. These latter calculations belong to this world; the Eucharist belongs to the eschaton, the heavenly, ultimate, reality. So by explaining Christ’s presence through the intervention of motion and velocity we ‘reduce to the order of space and time that which is meant to draw us out of it.’

21. Summa Theologiae, IIIa., q.75, a.4.
22. Ibid. q.75, a.4, ad iii.
23. Ibid. q.78, a.1.
24. R. F. Buxton, Eucharist and Institution Narrative. A Study in the Roman and Anglican Traditions of the Consecration of the Eucharist from the Eighth to the Twentieth Centuries (Great Wakering 1967), pp. 39-40.
25. J.H. McKenna, Eucharist and Holy Spirit. The Eucharistic Epiclesis in Twentieth Century Theology (Great Wakering 1975).
26. Summa Theologiae IIIa., q.75, a.1, ad i.
27. Ibid. q. 78, a.4, ad i.
28. A. Stolz, OSB, Manual Theologiae Dogmaticae, IV. De Sacramentis (Freiburg 1943), pp. 144-145.
29. Summa Theologiae IIIa., q.76, a.7.
30. Ibid. IIIa q.77. a.1.
31. Ibid. IIIa q.77. a.6.
32. Ibid. IIIa q.76. a.1.
33. Ibid. IIIa q.76. a.3.
34. Ibid. IIIa q.77. arts.5-6.
35. Ibid. IIIa q.76. a.6.
36. Ibid. IIIa q.77. a.7.
37. D.-S. 1642.
38. Ibid. 1636; cf. canon 1 on th sacrament of the Eucharist at ibid. 1651.

Posted by Joe at February 24, 2006 10:52 AM | TrackBack