Keefe - Real Presence Not Physical, Not Part of Fallen World, but Rather Restoration of it

A question over the physical presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist has been rattling around the English-speaking Church for the past decade. In recent months some published questions and answers concerning the "physical presence" of Christ in the Eucharist have been the subject of controversy.

One prominent pastor, after an unexceptionable affirmation of the traditional Eucharistic piety and doctrine supporting the exposition and adoration of the Eucharistic Lord, remarked ad cautelam that the Risen Jesus is not "physically present" in the Blessed Sacrament:

Contrary to what you may hear about the practice, Jesus is not physically present or contained in the tabernacle or the monstrance, nor is he a prisoner nor lonely, he does not need our company.

It is evident from the context in which this denial was placed that the "physical presence" he had in view is one which would submit the Eucharistic Christ to the accidents of space and time — a view of the Real Presence that is clearly ruled out by the Church’s historical tradition.

By now there is sufficient confusion and misunderstanding about what the Church means by the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist — a situation complicated by talk of the "many presences" of Christ — to warrant a review of the Church’s teaching.

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[T]he conviction that the Real Presence is properly called "substantial" was firmly in place more than a century before Saint Thomas spoke of the Eucharistic presence of Christ as a presence "per modum substantiae", i.e., in the manner of substance.

By this term he meant to indicate a Real Presence whose objective reality is not empirical, and which therefore is not submitted to the fragmentation, the mutability and the corruption proper to fallen time and space.

It follows that, insofar as "physical" is understood to mean "empirical", the Real Presence is not "physical". . . . Anyone accustomed to that interpretation of the "physical" would understand a denial of the "physical" presence of Christ in the Eucharist to be a denial of his substantial or concretely actual Real Presence. It must be insisted that the Real Presence is precisely corporeal, objective, and historical: it is a concrete Event — presence, whether the Event be termed transubstantiation, or the offering of the One Sacrifice. It is in this specifically Catholic understanding — that the Eucharist is concretely an Event, identically the Event of the Cross, that the Catholic Church parts company with those Protestants who affirm, with Luther, a Real Presence, but who, with Luther, deny the Sacrifice of the Mass, and deny transubstantiation.

It is well to avoid language which can be so easily misunderstood. It is better by far to speak of a substantial Real Presence because it is by a Presence per modum substantiae that the Risen Lord is incapable of being "imprisoned" or "contained" in this fallen world, whatever we may do.

If this is elementary; it is also an inadequate, because merely negative, grasp of the meaning of Christ’s Real Presence per modum substantiae. It is important that we view positively the Risen Christ’s Eucharistic transcendence of the changes and corruption of our fallen world, which is to say, that we understand it not merely as a sort of miraculous immunity, but rather as Jesus the Christ’s Lordship of history.

Thus understood, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the concretely corporeal and historical Event-Presence of the risen Christ, is the liberation of all creation, by its Head, from its ancient imprisonment by sin and the fear of death.

So viewed, we recognize in the Eucharistic Sacrifice the Head’s restoration to our fallen history of its free unity and salvific significance. This is His "recapitulation", His "re-heading", of the fallen world.

In the Mass the risen Christ, the second Adam, the Head, restores to the Good Creation — in signo, in the sacrificial institution of the Eucharistic One Flesh — that free and nuptial unity, the loveliness it had "in the Beginning," which is to say, that it had in the Christ, who is the Beginning, the Alpha as well as the Omega.

This Catholic conviction must trump the lis de verbis over whether the Real Presence of the Eucharistic Lord is "physical". His historical objectivity, His Sacrificial Event-Presence in the Mass and in the world, is Lordly: only thus is it redemptive.

Father Donald Keefe, SJ, author of Covenantal Theology, is professor of systematic theology teaching at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit.

From Donald J. Keefe, The Reality of the Real Presence in Adoremus Bulletin Online Edition – Vol. VIII, No. 1: March 2002.