Ramage - "Mystical Elevation" Perspective on Transubstantiation (Barron/Ratzinger/Sokolowski)

[Bishop Robert Barron, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, and Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI] share the conviction that transubstantiation might be more profoundly understood if we approach it beyond the confines of a strictly Aristotelian framework. Their goal is not to do away with the Church’s classical understanding, but to complement it by emphasizing that the Real Presence is not the result of an inner-worldly transformation of one substance into another at the same level of being. This intriguing perspective suggests that transubstantiation is best conceived as the elevation of nature to a higher ontological plane, a lifting of creation above itself resulting in a non-competitive presence of God within the created order. , , ,

Elevated to a Higher Order: Benedict XVI on Transubstantiation

[W]hile by no means opposing earlier magisterial teaching, the manner in which [Pope Benedict] described the mystery of transubstantiation stands out in relation to what we find in traditional sources like the Council of Trent:

[W]hat happens to the bread and wine in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist? Something is not added to them temporarily, but rather bread and wine are snatched away from the things of this world so as to enter into the new world of the risen Jesus Christ. . . . [The] bread and wine are no longer created realities of this world that consist in themselves, but rather are bearers of the mysteriously real form of the Risen Lord.¹

These words are but a short distillation of a theological vision that Ratzinger elaborated in greater depth at various points during his active ministry. For instance, in the tremendous little book God is Near Us, Cardinal Ratzinger exhibited a special sensitivity to doubts faced by the faithful, and this awareness prompted him to address a series of obstacles to belief in the real presence of the Lord. . . . 

The third and final of these challenges confronted by Ratzinger is especially crucial today, as it touches on the claim that the doctrine of the Real Presence has no place in a modern scientific worldview. In Ratzinger’s words, this same blunt question can be framed in several different ways:

Has the teaching about the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharistic gifts not long been refuted, rendered obsolete, by science? Has the Church not, with her concept of substance—for she speaks of “transubstantiation”—fettered herself, to far too great an extent, to a science that is basically primitive and obsolete? Do we not know precisely how material is constituted: made up of atoms, and these of elementary particles? That bread is not a “substance,” and, in consequence, none of the rest of it can possibly be true?²

In response, the cardinal opened with a reflection on what the Church means and does not mean with the words “substance” and “transubstantiation,” noting that the word “substance” was initially adopted by the Church “precisely to avoid the naïveté associated with what we can touch or measure”—to avoid the misapprehension that we “eat flesh, as cannibals would do.”³ Having ruled out this misconstrual of the Real Presence, Ratzinger characteristically paused to reflect on the providence surrounding such mistaken attempts to capture the Eucharistic mystery. Even as errors are not intrinsically desirable, the cardinal observed that disputes like these have nevertheless “helped the Church to develop a more profound understanding of reality.”⁴ Echoing the thought of one his favorite theologians, John Henry Newman, Ratzinger adds that this struggle indeed contributed positively to the development of doctrine in the Church—of making explicit truths that had hitherto been held truly but only implicitly:

After wrestling with the difficulty, the insight was made explicit: “Reality” is not just what we can measure. It is not only “quanta,” quantifiable entities, that are real; on the contrary, these are always only manifestations of the hidden mystery of true being. But here, where Christ meets us, we have to do with this true being. This is what was being expressed with the word “substance.” This does not refer to the quanta, but to the profound and fundamental basis of being. Jesus is not there like a piece of meat, not in the realm of what can be measured and quantified. Anyone who conceives of reality as being like that is deceiving himself about it and about himself. . . . Concerning the Eucharist it is said to us: The substance is transformed, that is to say, the fundamental basis of its being. That is what is at stake, and not the superficial category, to which everything we can measure or touch belongs.⁵

. . . 

While not renouncing the Medieval theology of transubstantiation (indeed, he begins here by praising Aquinas’s text for the liturgy of Corpus Christi), Ratzinger explains the doctrine in different language from that deployed by Thomas Aquinas. . . . Instead, Ratzinger describes transubstantiation as the event in which the Lord takes ordinary bread and wine and lifts them up into an unfathomably higher order of existence:

What has always mattered to the Church is that a real transformation takes place here. Something genuinely happens in the Eucharist. There is something new there that was not before. Knowing about a transformation is part of the most basic eucharistic faith. Therefore it cannot be the case that the Body of Christ comes to add itself to the bread, as if bread and Body were two similar things that could exist as two “substances,” in the same way, side by side. Whenever the Body of Christ, that is, the risen and bodily Christ, comes, he is greater than the bread, other, not of the same order. The transformation happens, which affects the gifts we bring by taking them up into a higher order and changes them, even if we cannot measure what happens.⁶

Inspired by St. Augustine, at this point Ratzinger presents an analogy with bodily nourishment to spell out what is taking place here. He begins by recalling the saint’s experience in which a voice informed him, “I am the bread of the strong, eat me! But you will not transform me and make me part of you; rather, I will transform you and make you part of me.” Teasing out the theological implications of this event, Ratzinger explains that Eucharistic transubstantiation functions in the inverse manner of natural metabolic processes. In the ordinary course of things, a being of higher ontological status assimilates lower beings so that they become part of his own substance. But with Eucharistic communion it is the other way around: Christ lifts us beyond ourselves, drawing our lives into his.⁷

Ratzinger then adds these words on the question of how it can be that the Eucharistic species that have been “lifted” or “taken up,” undergoing substantial change while remaining the same from the standpoint of physical appearances:

When material things are taken into our body as nourishment, or for that matter whenever any material becomes part of a living organism, it remains the same, and yet as part of a new whole it is itself changed. Something similar happens here. The Lord takes possession of the bread and the wine; he lifts them up, as it were, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order; even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different.⁸

Bishop Barron and Monsignor Sokolowski: The Eucharist as Sacramental Prolongation of the Incarnation

 . . .

Like the late pontiff, it appears that Barron and Sokolowski are not fully satisfied with a strictly Thomistic approach to articulating the Eucharistic mystery. Even as he continues to employ traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic language, Bishop Barron contends that an insufficient grasp of this framework can make it tempting to reduce Christ’s presence in the Eucharist to the same level of being occupied by physical creatures:

Within an Aristotelian framework, the Real Presence comes to be thought of as a sort inner-worldly change, some new and unprecedented way for finite natures—one spiritual and the other material—to relate to one another. But within the biblical context, things can make a bit more sense. For, in this reading, God is not one nature among others, one being within the world, but rather the Creator of the world, the ground of all finite things.⁹

At this juncture, the bishop references Monsignor Sokolowski, who urges us to beware of regarding our Lord’s Eucharistic presence as that of a worldly substance akin to that of any creature that we might encounter in this world:

The Real Presence in the Eucharist is therefore not just the concealed presence of one worldly substance under the appearances of another, but the presence of the full mystery of God’s being and his work, the mystery hidden from all ages and now made manifest to us, the point of the universe and of creation. It is this presence, this glory, that is the substance of the Eucharist and the core of the doctrine of Transubstantiation.¹⁰

In identifying this as the core of the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation, Barron and Sokolowski echo Ratzinger’s teaching that I unfolded above. As these theologians see it, our Lord’s Eucharistic presence is not such that he exists “in the same way, side by side” with the creatures he has made. The transubstantiated host is no longer on the same plane of being as the bread had previously existed, for it has been taken up into a higher order of reality through the sacrifice of the Mass.

Returning to Barron’s writing, the bishop proceeds by elaborating on an idea that Ratzinger only briefly touched on. Importantly, he recalls the Thomistic distinction between two orders of causality: divine and creaturely (i.e., God as the primary cause of all things and creatures as secondary or instrumental causes). However, Barron develops this in a direction that Aquinas did not explicitly go:

And thus God can relate to matter in a non-competitive way, becoming present through it without undermining it. The supreme instance of this non-competitive involvement of God within creation is, of course, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist is nothing but a sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation. Thus, God can use the material as a vehicle for his presence without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the matter that he uses. The Eucharist does not involve the supplanting of one finite nature by another—as though a tree becomes a leopard but continues to look and react like a tree—but the non-competitive presence of God within an aspect of nature he has made. . . . [W]hen the Church speaks of Christ being substantially present in the Eucharist, even as the material appearances of bread and wine remain, it is assuming this uniquely biblical perspective on the relation of spirit and matter.¹¹

From this standpoint, understanding the doctrine of transubstantiation requires us to grasp that the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood is not the same sort of action by which bread might be transformed into some other creaturely being like a rock, tree, or cat. As Barron stresses, it is not as if one finite nature supplants another in the Eucharist but rather that God—who exists on an altogether higher order of being in comparison with creatures—becomes present in a non-competitive way “within an aspect of nature he has made.”

Note that Bishop Barron is not claiming to advance a position akin to the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Like Ratzinger and Sokolowski, Barron rejects the notion that the substances of ordinary bread and wine coexist alongside our Lord’s body and blood in the Eucharist. The bishop’s position would likewise distinguish itself from the theory of impanation, according to which Christ is present in the Eucharist through a substantial union of his human body with the substances of bread and wine. Rather than saying that God has been made bread (Deus panis factus), for Barron the nature of transubstantiation is such that the bread and wine as they previously existed have indeed been transformed and now exist on an altogether higher order of being.

In this connection, it is especially important and beautiful that Bishop Barron describes the Eucharist as “nothing but a sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation.” Often attributed to second-century Doctor of the Church St. Irenaeus of Lyon, this view invites us to consider our Lord’s presence in the Eucharist in an analogous way to the manner he dwelt on the earth as a man. As Christ’s human nature was not overwhelmed or destroyed but rather ennobled by its union with the divine person of the Word, this perspective holds that the Eucharistic species are transformed and elevated by virtue of their being “taken up” into the divine nature. As such, they are no longer the substance of bread and wine any more than Jesus Christ was substantially a human person. As there is no second hypostasis (no human person) in Jesus but only the divine person of the Word united to his human nature, after consecration the hypostases of bread and wine are truly gone—which is to say transubstantiated. . . .

Even granted [some] lingering issues, the proposal presented in various ways by Ratzinger, Barron, and Sokolowski is a welcome contribution toward unveiling the meaning of transubstantiation in language that is accessible to modern man. Whatever we may make of the intricacies surrounding the ins and outs of how precisely it all transpires, the overarching claim that the Eucharist extends the Incarnation through space and time is true and valuable. It provides us a way of envisioning that, just as God was made present in the world in his body, blood, soul, and divinity two thousand years ago, this presence continues to abide with us in the Eucharist.

Further, I find that this modern approach to transubstantiation in terms of elevation coheres well with the Christian conviction that the entire created order will one day be renewed and transfigured rather than subverted or destroyed (see Rom 8:21–22). Indeed, so bold was Ratzinger’s perspective on the eschatological end of creatures that he spoke of a time when the entire created order will one day be “transubstantiated” in heavenly glory.¹² On the solemnity of Corpus Christi, Benedict expounded on this concept by teaching that “this little piece of white Host . . . appears to us as a synthesis of creation” and that “in some way, we detect in the piece of bread, creation is projected towards divinization, toward the holy wedding feast, toward unification with the Creator himself.”¹³ In a remarkable homily, the pontiff taught that the role of the priesthood is “to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy.”¹⁴

1  Benedict XVI, “The Meaning of Communion,” in What Is Christianity? The Last Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2023), 156–57.
2  Joseph Ratzinger, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 83–84.
3  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 84.
4  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 84.
5  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 85.
6  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 86.
7  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 77–78.
8  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 86.
9  Robert Barron, This Is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival (Grove Village, IL: Word on Fire, 2023), 107.
10  Robert Sokolowski, “The Eucharist and Transubstantiation,” in Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 103.
11  Barron, This Is My Body, 107-108.
12  Benedict XVI, Address at the Commemoration of the 65th Anniversary of the Priestly Ordination of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (June 28, 2016).
13  Benedict XVI, Homily for the Mass of Corpus Christi (June 15, 2006).
14  Benedict XVI, Homily (July 24, 2009).

From Matthew Ramage, "Mystical Elevation: A Modern Perspective on the Ancient Doctrine of Transubstantiation" in Church Life Journal, September 18, 2025.

De Lubac - Teilhard and the divine presence (3)

Pere Teilhard might, again, have said with St John of the Cross, "the centre proper to each of us, the centre of the soul, is God".* His own words, indeed, are better and more accurate, "The centre of centres", and, again, "Centrum super centra". Such was for him, "at the heart of the world, the heart of a God". No doubt he was more familiar with The Book of St Angela of Foligno, which he had read before 1916, since he quotes it freely in La Vie Cosmique and refers to it again in the Milieu mystique. He was later to quote it again in the Milieu Divin, probably after re-reading it in the translation his friend Pere Paul Doncoeur† brought out in 1926. "I saw", says St Angela, "that every creature was filled with him"; and again, "I see him who is being, and I see how he is the being of all creatures." He translated this classic doctrine into his own words when he spoke of the "transparency of the universe", to the eye of faith—which is for him the "milieu divin". He placed it, of course, in its proper perspective, too, when he explained that it is impossible to set God "as a focus at the summit of the Universe without, in doing so, simultaneously impregnating with his presence even the most insignificant evolutionary movement "; it is impossible, therefore, to see in this "supreme consciousness" a "higher pole of synthesis" without at the same time asserting its "omnipresence" and "omni-action".‡ This means that the immanence of God is seen as deriving from his transcendence, and is thus the exact contrary of immanentism. 

Elsewhere Teilhard adds, "God the eternal being in himself, is everywhere, we might say, in process of formation for us". Here, every word should be weighed. One should not concentrate only on the second half of the sentence, and, above all, the words "for us" should not be overlooked. It will be noted, too, that, in the correlative assertion of a dynamic immanence, the idea of divine transcendence is in no way over-shadowed. "The majesty of the Universe" does not obscure for him "the primacy of God." While Pere Teilhard, in the hope of rousing the Christian of today from a lethargy he believes hostile to the spread and even the maintenance of his faith, urges him to "discern, below God, the values of the world, at the same time he is careful to urge the humanist of today to "discern, above the world, the place held by a God ".§ And it is with the same care to maintain the correct relation between immanence and transcendence that he speaks of Christ: "The risen Christ of the Gospel can never hold, in the consciousness of the faithful, his primacy over the created world that, by definition, he is to consummate, except by incorporating in himself the evolution that some people seek to oppose to him."

Here his teaching echoes his prayer: "Lord, grant that I may see, that I may see You, that I may see and feel You present in all things and animating all things." "If so many souls have been touched by his message", writes Jean Lacroix, "it is perhaps primarily because he knew how again to make of the universe a Temple."||

If man, as Teilhard understands him, is to fulfil his destiny, he must add the voice of his consciousness and, throughout all his activity, of his freely given homage, to the hymn that rises up to God from all creation. That is why we may speak of "Pere Teilhard's cosmic liturgy": and why, too, The Hymn of the Universe was a happy choice of title for a miscellany of prayers and meditations selected from his writings.¶

* The Living Flame, I, 3. 

† La Vie Cosmique, p. 57; "God is everywhere, God is everywhere (St Angela of Foligno)." Le Milieu Divin, p. 116; "The Creator and, more specifically, the Redeemer have steeped themselves in all things and penetrated all things to such a degree that, as St Angela of Foligno said, 'The world is full of God'." Cf. The Making of a Mind, p. 130. 

‡ L'Atomisme de l'Esprit (1941); Oeuvres, VII, p. 61. Cf. Robert Bellarmine, De ascensions mentis in Deum, gradus 2: "Were another world to be created, God would fill that, too; and if there were to be more worlds, or even an infinite number of worlds, God would fill them all. . . . with his omnipotence and wisdom, he is present everywhere" (Montpellier ed. 1823, pp. 40-1). 

§ Quelques reflexions sur la conversion du monde (1936), p.2. L'Energie humaine (1937); "... above creation ..." (VI, p. 10). In 1952, a San Francisco newspaper printed a report from a French newsagency [sic] to the effect that "the God of Pere Teilhard was becoming a God immanent in the evolution of the world". On 3 Aug., Teilhard wrote from New York to Pere Andre Ravier, "What annoys me in this business is the offhanded way it makes me jettison a divine 'transcendence' that I have, on the contrary, spent all my life in defending—though seeking at the same time, it is true (like everyone, but by using the new properties of a universe in process of cosmogenesis) to reconcile it with an immanence which everyone agrees must be given a progressively more important and more explicit place in our philosophy and religion." 

|| Le Sens de l'atheisme modern (1958), p. 28. Cf. letter of 7 Aug. 1923: "With himself, Man brings back to God the lower beings of the world. Sin consists in falling back among them;—virtue in carrying them along with him." 

¶ Some hasty readers have referred to this as "Hymn to the Universe", a mistake that points to a serious misunderstanding of Teilhard's thought. I have also seen it called "Hymns to the Universe". A similar mis-reading is referred to later (pp. 95,188). 

Henri de Lubac - Teilhard: the man and his meaning (1965), p. 26-28  

The penultimate paragraph and its accompanying footnote remind of something Bishop Barron has said about God's intention that humanity have a priestly role in offering the natural world to Him as sacrifice. I'll try to find the video where he talked abut that and reference it here.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Barron - The Divinization of One’s Passivities (God works through suffering)

As I lay on my back in [the hospital], a phrase kept coming unbidden into my mind: “the divinization of one’s passivities.” This is a line from one of the great spiritual works of the twentieth century, The Divine Milieu by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In that seminal text, Teilhard famously distinguished between the divinization of one’s activities and the divinization of one’s passivities. The former is a noble spiritual move, consisting in the handing over of one’s achievements and accomplishments to the purposes of God. A convinced Jesuit, Teilhard desired to devote all that he did (and he did a lot) ad majorem Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God).  But this attitude, Teilhard felt, came nowhere near the spiritual power of divinizing one’s passivities. By this he meant the handing over of one’s suffering to God, the surrendering to the Lord of those things that are done to us, those things over which we have no control. We become sick; a loved one dies suddenly; we lose a job; a much-desired position goes to someone else; we are unfairly criticized; we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the valley of the shadow of death. These experiences lead some people to despair, but the spiritually alert person should see them as a particularly powerful way to come to union with God. A Christian would readily speak here of participating in the cross of Christ. Indeed how strange that the central icon of the Christian faith is not of some great achievement or activity, but rather of something rather horrible being done to a person. The point is that suffering, offered to God, allows the Lord to work his purpose out with unsurpassed power. 

In some ways, Teilhard’s distinction is an echo of St. John of the Cross’s distinction between the “active” and “passive” nights of the soul. For the great Spanish master, the dark night has nothing to do with psychological depression, but rather with a pruning away of attachments that keep one from complete union with God. This pruning can take a conscious and intentional form (the active night) or it can be something endured. In a word, we can rid ourselves of attachments—or God can do it for us. The latter, St. John thinks, is far more powerful and cleansing than the former. 

Bishop Robert Barron, Hospitalland and the Divinization of One's Passivities (blog post May 26, 2015)

The word "passive" is one we try to avoid these days, at least with reference to ourselves. To admit that situations arise where we can simply be acted upon, as opposed to being active (or even better, proactive) is to admit our own limitations in a way that is decidedly anti-modern. But Bishop Barron, citing Teilhard, makes the point here that it is often those very moments of passivity forced upon us by our human condition that God uses to purge us of dross and prepare us to enter the Kingdom.