At a dinner party the other day, I sat next to a charming and exceedingly clever woman. Though I’ve known her for many years, until that evening the subject of religion never came up.
However, the proximity of Easter made such exclusion impossible, and my dinner companion said she was Presbyterian. As such, she thought the whole idea of transubstantiation (Eucharistic bread and wine turning into the body and blood of Christ) was nonsensical.
I began to mumble something about Aristotle with his substances and accidents, but stopped myself in mid-sentence. Discussing such things with a charming woman at a boozy party is a social faux pas, a crime worse than theological ignorance.
So instead of boring her by whispering sweet philosophical nothings into her ear, I’m going to bore you in writing, though I hope not too much.
Christian theology is basically interpretation of Scripture, which according to believers is the word of God. But God was an exceptionally gifted writer who used a variety of techniques: straight talk, poetic imagery, metaphors and other figures of speech, parables, novelistic narration.
Such virtuosity, incidentally, is sometimes used as proof of authenticity: human writers began to learn all such narrative techniques only when the novel took its place on the literary landscape in the 18th century.
Since the Evangelists couldn’t be confused with Messrs Richardson and Fielding, one has to believe God himself was moving their quills. By themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to make it up, as was indirectly stipulated by Tertullian (Credo quia absurdum).
All in all, it’s undeniable that some Biblical pronouncements are literal and some are figurative. Much of theology is about understanding which is which and converting such understanding into doctrine.
This leaves room for arbitrary interpretations: various denominations choose to treat as figurative the same passages other denominations understand literally, and vice versa. And cultured atheists treat the Bible as merely well-written science fiction and read it for its prose only (especially the KJV).
Relevant to my aborted dinnertime conversation are two passages in the New Testament, both becoming even more poignant at this time of the year:
“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” (Matthew 26: 26)
And,
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6: 53-54)
Now, according to Catholic doctrine, which Protestants, such as my Presbyterian friend, consider nonsensical, the Eucharistic bread and wine turn in substance into the body and blood of Christ. The highlighted words are key.
They don’t eliminate the mystery of the Eucharist or, for that matter, any other Christian dogma. But they put the mystery on a philosophical footing.
The philosophy comes from Aristotle’s teaching on substances and accidents, the former being the metaphysical essence of things and the latter their outer properties and attributes. To illustrate, in a crude way guaranteed to make my philosophically educated friends gasp, just look at a tree.
It may be pollarded or not, in bloom or not, in leaf or not, robust or dying, but it will remain the same tree in substance. All the permutations above, on the other hand, are what Aristotle called accidents. This is confirmed by committed urbanists who sneer at any request to identify a particular tree (“It’s a tree, innit?”).
The same basic teaching reappears in Kant’s notions of noumena and phenomena, and in any number of other philosophies dealing with the nature of reality. In Catholic doctrine, the substance of the bread and wine taken at communion changes into the body and blood of Christ, while the outward appearance of the treats remains the same.
In some Protestant denominations, especially Calvinist ones like Presbyterianism, the bread and wine are merely symbols, metaphors or ‘pneumatic’ reminders of Christ’s presence. As Calvin put it, “the Spirit truly unites things separated in space”, but Christ’s body and blood aren’t physically present at communion.
Such are the crude outlines of the profound and nuanced issues involved. These can’t be blithely dismissed out of hand, in my friend’s manner, or stupidly described as a form of cannibalism, as atheists often do. But no one can deny their existence.
Some of history’s greatest minds pondered and debated the doctrine of the Real Presence for centuries, and they’ll doubtless continue to do so in perpetuity. It’s up to individual Christians to decide whether to dip into such waters just below the surface, more deeply, or not at all.
But only some familiarity, no matter how cursory, issues the license to pronounce on such matters. Alas, this basic requirement is nowadays routinely ignored, and not just in this area.
“I’m entitled to my opinion” has become a buzz phrase of modernity. Whenever I hear it uttered in defence of obvious ignorance, I always reply: “Yes, but you aren’t entitled to an audience.” Alas, the idea that strong opinions ending up in the public domain must start from at least some knowledge has fallen by the wayside.
The counterintuitive assumption that all men are equal leads inexorably to an even sillier one, that all opinions are equal. This is guaranteed to reduce thinking to sloganeering, which is especially noticeable in politics.
In religion, most believers would be better off if they simply accepted Church dogmas just because the Church says so. The Apostolic and Nicaean Creeds are as far as most believers have to go. Those who choose to go beyond that point and delve into the tremendous corpus of Christian theology and philosophy, will be richly rewarded, but such inquisitiveness is by no means necessary.
What’s not just unnecessary but offensive is self-confident promulgation of ignorance. Especially when it proceeds from the ideology of equality so dear to every modern heart.
Even when I considered myself a Christian, I did find it hard to believe that the communal bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. But you’re right to suggest that abandoning that tenet is the first step on the road to atheism.
In John chapter 6, through 10 of 12 consecutive verses, Jesus speaks of his flesh as meat or bread that is to be eaten. As I wrote in my comment on yesterday’s article, many of his disciples responded “This saying is hard, and who can hear it?” and walked with Him no more. Jesus did not call them back explaining that it was a metaphor, a parable, or a figure of speech. He let those leave who did not believe.
Have a blessed Triduum!
Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accidents is interesting to philosophers, but is it divinely inspired? I think the Holy Sacrament of the Altar is a heavenly mystery that baffles all earthly curiosity.
Aquinas’s misapplication of Aristotle to the great Christian mystery has also been the source of much superstition: if Corpus Christi processions and the Rite of Benediction aren’t superstitious, what is? But in the Orthodox Church (which you probably guessed I was going to mention sooner or later), we don’t even elevate the newly consecrated Body of Christ, lest the foolish make the mistake of worshipping it.
So this is yet another difference between East and West. In the West, Aquinas and Zwingli and Calvin and John Keble are furiously debating what precisely is going on in the Divine Liturgy, while in the East we’re calmly and contently receiving our holy nourishment, the undebatable Body and Blood of Christ.
Your lumping together of Aquinas and Calvin is most refreshing. This reminds me yet again that Catholicism is much more tolerant of Eastern Christianity than vice versa. Thus you’ll notice that I’ve never described Orthodoxy as heretical (even if I may consider it that in my innermost thoughts). The obvious problems with it are the secular proofs of the ecclesiastical pudding: it’s Western, not Eastern, Christianity that created history’s greatest civilisation. We have Bach; you have Grechaninov. Thank you very much.
But you are right that we don’t need Aristotle to be present at communion. We believe in the Real Presence because Christ said so. We know he is present, and there’s the end to it. How he is present is an infinite mystery our finite minds can’t grasp. However, there also exists church doctrine, which in this case I find believable enough to accept. I only invoke philosophy when trying (usually in vain) to explain such things to the intelligent uninitiated.
1. As far as I can tell, Calvin’s theology is mostly derived from Aquinas, except where he (disastrously) prefers Augustine or (even more disastrously) Anselm. But I didn’t quite lump Calvin and Aquinas together: I distinguished them as debating a question that ought not to have been asked, along with Zwingli and Keble (respectively the worst and best of the list, in my opinion).
Like you, I try to avoid the word “heresy” in East/West debates.
Your argumentum ab sublimitate (if that’s the right phrase) is one that I find difficult to resist emotionally but easy to refute. While it’s true that the Western Church has all the best music, it’s also true that Ancient Greece has all the best poetry, but we don’t think that people who rightly exalt Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus ought to worship Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, do we?
By the way, nobody would rank Gretchaninov’s liturgical music with Bach’s, but Bach was a Protestant. One has to go back to the lost art of Palestrina and Victoria to find Gretchaninov’s superior in the Roman Church. In more modern times, I think only Bruckner is his equal.
Oops! I intended to enumerate the first three paragraphs as 1., 2. and 3., in order to make it clear that they were unrelated comments, but somehow I only got as far as 1.. The fourth paragraph is of course a mere parergon.
So you consider Gretchaninov superior to, say, William Byrd. A matter of taste, I suppose. Bach was a Lutheran, but he transcended Protestantism. B Minor Mass, for example. Luther himself was an artist, which is why he, unlike Calvin, encouraged music and artisitic expression. And Calvin’s central idea, that of predestination, comes straight from Augustine, and I find it hard to discern any Thomist influences. I just wonder if you rate any theologian who wrote in Latin, such as the three giants you mentioned. It’s that thing I mentioned before: Catholics are much more tolerant of the Orthodox than vice versa.
1. Byrd practised the same lost art as Palestrina and Victoria. But I find as much musical and spiritual merit in Gretchaninov as in Byrd’s pupil Tomkins, and that’s a lot of merit.
2. The Kyrie, Gloria and Sanctus of Bach’s B minor Mass are completely compatible with the Lutheran liturgy (Latin words and all). The Credo and Agnus Dei seem to me to have been added partly because of Bach’s familiar aspiration to completeness and partly because he had hopes of a job in Dresden. If it’s permissible to argue that Bach “transcended Protestantism” in the direction of Rome, one could also argue from the unsatisfactory setting of Et in Spiritum Sanctum that Bach was well on the way to Orthodoxy!
3. It’s Calvin’s doctrine of the Trinity that seems to me to be derived from Aquinas. They both put the Nature of God before His Persons – the Unity before the Trinity – and that’s backwards.
4. The Latin theologians I most admire and enjoy are St Hilary of Poitiers and St John Cassian. I read Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas (and many others) before disagreeing with them. Did you read St Photius the Great, St Gregory Palamas and St Symeon the New Theologian before disagreeing with them?
If GOD is the all-powerful being as claimed having created EVERYTHING visible and invisible then making body of bread and blood of wine is simple. Since GOD made the rules he can change the rules of nature as he sees fit.