Salkeld - Transubstantiation Based on God's Role as Creator and Affects Many Other Doctrines

The recent Pew Survey results, suggesting that only a minority of Catholics accept their Church’s teaching on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, have led to widespread hand-wringing in the Catholic community. . . .

[I]t was noted by some that the survey used a term, “actually,” to describe Christ’s presence that the Church itself does not use, leading, perhaps, to confusion (and false negatives) on the part of respondents. Moreover, it was pointed out, the question seemed to presume a dichotomy between sign and reality that is foreign to Catholic sacramental theology.

Which brings us to the topic of transubstantiation. For while the Church does not anywhere teach that Christ is “actually” (or, for that matter, “physically,” or “literally,” to take two other terms of indeterminate meaning and no theological pedigree) present in the Eucharist, it does teach that he is really, truly, and substantially present. Moreover, this last adjective, substantialiter in the Latin, made its emergence in the history of theology right when the Church needed a way of speaking about Christ’s Eucharistic presence that accounted for both the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and for the fact that that reality is, as with any sacrament (just check your Baltimore Catechism) mediated through signs.

It is probably helpful, at this stage, to point out just what the theological tradition has meant by “real.” For contemporary people, “real” often means simply physical, existing in space; “actual” might suffer from the same interpretation. But many (even most) of us believe in things that are not “real” in this sense. “Justice,” for instance, or “truth,” or, perhaps, “the soul,” or, preeminently, “God.” What the Church has meant by “real” in the case of Christ’s Eucharistic presence is, in fact, something quite precise, namely, that in the Eucharist God is the actor who determines the reality. Christ’s presence is not, then, something a group of humans conjures by their own powers of memory or of symbolic meaning making, as formidable as those powers may be. It is a gift of God, a gift of the creator who makes things to be what they are. . . .

Aquinas’s work on transubstantiation is rightly recognized as the classic articulation. Trent quoted it almost verbatim three centuries later (basically changing one technical term to make the point that one does not need to be an Aristotelian philosopher to affirm transubstantiation). Other theologies of transubstantiation that followed Thomas are almost universally seen as regressions from the ideal.

What makes Thomas’s work so perennial in this arena? It is, quite simply, that, better than anyone since, Thomas managed to articulate a presence that is undoubtedly real—in a certain sense more real than physical reality—and undeniably sacramental.

In my book, I spend the bulk of a lengthy chapter walking through Thomas’s doctrine of transubstantiation in the tertia pars of the Summa Theologiae demonstrating just this. In question 75, Thomas spends one article comparing transubstantiation with consubstantiation and the next with annihilation/replacement. Consubstantiation is rejected as, essentially, unsacramental. Ditto for annihilation/replacement. But what many fail to recognize is that neither are sufficiently eschatological. In the work of redemption, God does not leave unchanged or annihilate creation, but transforms it. The bread and wine cannot exist alongside Christ’s body and blood. Nor can they be replaced by Christ’s body and blood. They must become Christ’s body and blood. In this they are the catalysts for the change that the Eucharist effects on the whole world. . . .

In the last article of question 75, Thomas undertakes another comparison to help his reader to better comprehend what is and is not indicated by transubstantiation. In this article transubstantiation is compared with two other kinds of “change”: natural change and creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). . . .

It has been said that the theology of Thomas Aquinas is like a hologram. Every part contains every other part. Therefore, to study any question from his corpus in depth is to get an introduction to his theology as a whole. This was certainly my experience. And my study of transubstantiation has equipped me to write and teach about not just the sacraments, but Christology, ethics, Christian anthropology, ecclesiology, eschatology, the doctrine of God, even Scripture. The laser beam that shot out from the doctrine of transubstantiation and subsequently unfolded the whole hologram of Thomas’s theology for me was undoubtedly his doctrine of creation, specifically, the way Thomas understands the relationship between God and creation.

Which takes us back to Aristotle and article 8 of question 75 of the Summa. Aristotle believed in the eternity of the universe. Since something exists, something has always existed. It is only the Judeo-Christian understanding of a radically other and transcendent God that could make any sense of the universe having a beginning, of a creation out of nothing. And of such a God Aristotle was quite innocent. Aquinas, though he finds Aristotle’s categories quite useful, breaks with Aristotle on the foundational question of the eternity of the universe. And this has radical consequences for the way he can use Aristotle in his theology, not least on the question of the Eucharist.

This is because it is only a creator God like the God of the Judeo-Christian biblical and philosophical tradition that could possibly change bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood without transforming their physical characteristics. In article 8 of question 75, Thomas distinguishes transubstantiation from natural change, or transformation, because in natural change natural causes act in natural ways to produce change. So, for example, a fire can turn a wooden log or plank into smoke and ashes. But he also distinguishes it from creation ex nihilo, which is not, properly speaking, a change at all, since there is literally no thing that becomes some other thing. While it is unlike both natural change and creation ex nihilo in these ways, transubstantiation is like natural change in that one term becomes another term, and like creation ex nihilo in that only the power of a transcendent creator God could effect it.

Because a creator God gives existence, and is always giving existence, the meaning of existence itself shifts radically from Aristotle to Aquinas. For Aristotle, existing substances are radically independent. For Thomas, even the independence of existing substances is being given, moment by moment, by God. The very independence of the creature depends on God. This metaphysical move makes what many have observed is impossible in an Aristotelian universe—the conversion of one substance into another without a concomitant change of physical characteristics, what Aristotle and Thomas call “accidents”—possible in a world held in being by a transcendent creator God. . . .

And this, I suggest, is the bigger question behind the Pew Survey results. As disappointing as the results were, they are not surprising. And not simply because of irreverent liturgies or inadequate catechesis. The deeper issue underlies those realities as well. We do not live in a world where people, even many Christian people, have a sense of the transcendent power of God and of God’s intimate, but non-competitive, relationship with creation.

The doctrine of real presence is not the only thing affected by this. We can easily imagine disappointing results on similar survey questions asking things like: Do Catholics believe Jesus is God or a great human teacher?; Do Catholics believe in creation or evolution?; Do Catholics believe in God’s providence or in free will?; Is Scripture is the infallible word of God or a culturally conditioned artifact (instructive, it is implied, but not authoritative)?; and, Is contraception wrong? (This latter fits the pattern because the question in the background of it, and of any similar ethical question, is something like: “Is morality derived from the nature of things as given by their creator or determined by Church authority?). Every one of these is, at root, a false dichotomy that is posited because God is imagined to be in competition with creation.

Transubstantiation is not, then, one disconnected and esoteric doctrine that a Catholic can take or leave. It is an articulation of faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist seeking understanding in the theological context of a deep appreciation of the relationship between God and creation. To affirm it is to affirm something foundational to the whole Christian worldview. Not to put too fine a point on it: it affirms that God is God and creation is creation.

O salutaris Hostia,

Quae caeli pandis ostium.

From Brett Salkeld, "Transubstantiation Isn't a Disconnected Doctrine" in Church Life Journal November 13, 2019.