Matter, your own living flesh and blood or the bread and wine brought to the altar, is an essential element of any Christian Sacrament. More than that, it’s the most concrete part of a sacramental world. Even non-sacramental Christians accept baptism as a Sacrament though perhaps refusing to use the term, but I’m going to write about one of the Sacraments they don’t accept—the Eucharistic Rite.
In a Sacrament, God operates upon matter, sometimes through an ordained priest and, in the case of baptism, through any human being who uses water and the proper Trinitarian formula. Under Catholic teaching, no minister and no Rite celebrated in a church is even needed for a wedding since it’s only God and the man and the woman who are parties to the formation of a marriage bond—a formal wedding is no guarantee the bride and bride-groom made the proper commitment to each other and the lack of a formal wedding doesn’t necessarily weaken any such commitment which forms a wedding bond.
But it’s that Eucharistic Rite I wish to discuss with Holy Week approaching. The Bible tells us that, on Holy Thursday, Jesus Christ changed bread into His own Body and wine into His own Blood. In addition, the Lord instituted a sacramental priesthood to celebrate this Eucharistic Rite (and to do much else) after He ascended into Heaven.
That much is clear, but the question remains: How was it possible for even God to have changed bread into the very Flesh of God incarnate and wine into His very Blood. Such an act would seem to be more magic than what we might expect given the work of Darwin and Einstein and the like. On the other hand, Catholics claim to have a doctrine of transubstantiation, but that’s really just a pointer toward a Platonic way of looking at the world as made of substantial entities which form relationships with each other or with God. Or fail to form such relationships. This is a viewpoint in which God is seen as acting upon substance in the way of a Zeus, a God who resides upon Mt Olympus, or in Heaven, and looks down, sometimes choosing to carry out some sort of magical act, to heal someone or to turn bread into the Flesh of Christ, wine into the Blood of Christ. Transubstantiation once made sense in terms of Christian understandings of Creation and was developed for that purpose. It no longer makes sense and can only be held as a superstition, however much sense transubstantiation might have made or seemed to have made.
Consistent with my teachings about what it means to understand Creation, I look for an understanding of the Real Presence on the Altar, the bread has become the Flesh of Christ and the wine His Blood, in terms not necessarily consistent with any existing human schemes of knowledge but rather in terms of an understanding of Creation which reflects the best empirical understanding of that Creation and also in terms of Christian revelation. We have to take what empirical science tells us and what the Bible tells us, dropping the speculative theological theories which no longer work and going beyond the limited speculative scientific theories. We have to develop new speculative theories more appropriate to our current understanding of Creation, including our understanding of the mundane, thing-like being which presents itself to our eyes and ears, our noses and our fingers.
Aquinas had this to say about our efforts to understand “God’s wisdom”:
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures [God] made… (Page 17 of St Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians as translated by Fabian Larcher, OP and now available as an online document at the website of Priory of the Immaculate Conception, which is a Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It might still be available as a downloadable pdf if you search the Internet.)
Most certainly, if we are to understand Creation and God’s relationships to individual creatures, we must understand the matter of this world, this very concrete realm of Creation. We must examine “the creatures [God] made.” We must understand what physicists have discovered about protons and pions and neutrinos and we must eventually move on to a more exact understanding of what the biologists have discovered about living flesh and blood and the evolutionary/genetic foundations of that living stuff.
Yet, modern sacramental Christians, even many priests or other theologians, go to Mass seemingly unaware that they have a fundamental lack of understanding about the sacraments they celebrate because they have an inherited understanding of matter at odds with modern scientific discoveries but also at odds with Biblical revelation. Matter exists and then forms relationships. Can that be, from a Christian viewpoint? Are we conceived and then God chooses to love us? Do we develop into specific human beings and then our mothers choose to love us? No, the love comes first and works to create from nothingness when God initially acts and to create in the sense of shaping when God continues to act upon us and our mothers also act upon us.
So, what happens upon the altar when the priest calls upon the Holy Spirit to consecrate bread so that it becomes the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ and wine so that it becomes His Blood?
Catholic theological works, and undoubtedly those of other sacramental Christians, will teach that sacraments involve God working in a special way upon matter, possibly matter which is a living human animal. So, again, we need to have some plausible and coherent answer to the question: What is matter? I’ve given the answer by discussing the love which God and our mothers feel for us. Having given the answer in an intuitive form, I’ll provide links for more explicit and (somewhat) more disciplined discussions.
See two of my early blog essays, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality and Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation: Part 1 for short discussions of the primacy of relationships from the viewpoint of modern science and philosophy recognizing the discoveries of modern science and also—quite consistently—from the viewpoint of St John the Evangelist.
In a somewhat later essay, What is Mind?: Part 2. Rules or Context?, I deal with the issue from the viewpoint of the human mind and how it’s formed—as an encapsulation of those relationships we discern behind or beneath the concrete stuff we can directly perceive.
In a still later essay, Evolutionary Thomists Don’t Do Ontology, I discuss the issue in responding to the somewhat conflicting thoughts of the theologian Metropolitan John Zizioulas of the Greek Orthodox Church who sees the change of matter into the Body and Blood of Christ as occurring as a result of a point-like, Platonic change of the ontological status of that bread and blood. I present it as being the result of a change in the relationship of God toward that bread and blood on the altar, a way of thinking that allows us to see that matter—bread and blood—in terms consistent with modern understandings of matter. The major difference between my answer and that of Zizioulas is that my answer recognizes the modern discovery that we live in a world of what might be called `existential relationship’, a world of evolution and development and not one where Platonic Forms or Reals are shadowed in pre-existing chaotic forms of matter. Rather than our world being populated by entities which are feeble shadows of ideal entities, Forms or Reals, our world and the entities in it are the result of God acting through evolutionary and developmental processes working over multiple levels of reality and all grounded upon the “raw stuff” of Creation, a realm in which God manifested the truths He chose for Creation. It is the Word of God, Christ, who gave that raw stuff from Himself and it is that raw stuff which is still present in all created matter, including the bread and wine on the altar. That bread and wine becomes subject to a new relationship, to a re-creation to become the Son of God Incarnate in a more direct way than other matter. Essentially, that Body and Blood is loved by God in the way that Father and Son and Holy Spirit love each other in their one Divinity. Or so I would speak to make greater—though still provisional—sense of the Real Presence on the altar in this year of 2015.