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Transubstantiation, essentialism,and substance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2010

PATRICK TONER
PATRICK TONER*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC27109
*
e-mail: tonerpj@wfu.edu
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Abstract

According to the Eucharistic doctrine of Transubstantiation, when the priest consecrates the bread and wine, the whole substance of the bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ. The ‘accidents’ of the bread and wine, however, remain present on the altar. This doctrine leads to a clutch of metaphysical problems, some of which are particularly troubling for essentialists. In this paper, I discuss some of these problems, which have recently been pressed by Brian Ellis and Justin Broackes. I argue that defenders of Transubstantiation have satisfactory replies.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 217 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. The interest of the medieval scholastics in such theological matters is fairly obvious, but for a good introduction to some of the issues and figures, see Adams, Marilyn McCord ‘Aristotle and the sacrament of the altar’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplement, 17 (1992), 195–249.Google Scholar As to early modern philosophers, Roger Ariew has argued quite persuasively that they were deeply interested in these issues, as well; cf. his Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 7. See also a pair of articles by Daniel Fouke on the role of Transubstantiation in Leibniz's thought: ‘Metaphysics, apologetics and the Eucharist in the early Leibniz’, Studia Leibnitiana, 24 (1992), 145–159Google Scholar, and ‘Dynamics and Transubstantiation in Leibniz's Systema Theologicum’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32 (1994), 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the prominent recent philosophers who have had something to say about Transubstantiation are Elizabeth Anscombe ‘On Transubstantiation’, in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, III, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 107–112; and Michael Dummett ‘The intelligibility of Eucharistic doctrine’, in W. Abraham and S. Holzer (eds) The Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 231–261. Most recently, Alexander Pruss has written a very fine piece on the Eucharist: ‘The Eucharist: real presence and real absence’, in Flint, T. and Rea, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Ellis, BrianScientific Essentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92Google Scholar.

3. Dawkins, Richard ‘Viruses of the mind’, in Dahlbom, B. (ed.) Dennett and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 21Google Scholar.

4. I am quite enthusiastic about Ellis's work, and I agree wholeheartedly with a great deal of it. However, it must be admitted, even by a sympathetic reader, that his treatment of this issue is shoddy at best. The extent of his engagement with the doctrine of Transubstantiation is a citation from an online encyclopedia. And he appears to labour under the extraordinary confusion that the Council of Trent's declaration on Transubstantiation was an attempt ‘to make sense of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation’; Ellis Scientific Essentialism, 92. Of course, it is not an attempt to make sense of the doctrine: it is a dogmatic declaration of what the revealed doctrine is, made by the Council because the doctrine was being denied by the Protestant Reformers. It is the work of the Church's theologians and philosophers to ‘make sense’ of the dogma. Theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Suarez, and many others devoted literally hundreds of pages to ‘making sense’ of the doctrine, and although Ellis managed to sneer at this work – calling it ‘medieval mumbo-jumbo’ – he shows no signs of having read any of it.

5. Broackes, Justin ‘Substance’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 106 (2006), 133–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical Council of Trent, Session XIII, Chapter IV, J. Waterworth (trans.) (London: Dolman 1848). Available at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct13.html

7. Ludwig Ott Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (Rockford IL: Tan, 1974), 383. This point is not, to my knowledge, a defined dogma of the Catholic Faith. Ott tells us it is taught ‘Sent. certa’, which is to say, it is ‘a doctrine, on which the Teaching Authority of the Church has not yet finally pronounced, but whose truth is guaranteed by its intrinsic connection with the doctrine of revelation’; ibid., 9–10.

8. Believers in impanation (according to which Christ assumes the bread and wine, which themselves remain present on the altar) or consubstantiation (which, again, holds that the bread and wine remain present on the altar) would not be vulnerable to what I'll call Objection 2 from Ellis, or to the Argument from Broackes. However, they would be vulnerable to Objection 1 from Ellis, and perhaps the epistemological concerns I raise in that discussion.

9. Ellis Scientific Essentialism, 1.

10. ibid., 2.

11. See Michael Loux Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1998), ch. 3; Michael Gorman, ‘Re–thinking essence and substance’ (unpublished ms). Natural kinds play a vital role in Ellis's view, as well, though there are differences in the way they are employed there.

12. Thus, this view does not run afoul of Ellis's animadversions about substantial kinds being counted as property kinds; Ellis Scientific Essentialism, 92–93.

13. St Thomas Aquinas holds that the bread is a substance. See Summa Theologiae [henceforth ST] III, 75, 6 ad. 1. I deny that the bread is a substance (and that the wine in the chalice is a substance). I believe that it is an aggregate of substances. So I will have to tell a slightly more complicated story than the one I give in the text. Here is a compressed and fictionalized account, to give some idea of how it goes. The bread is an aggregate of very small substances. Call them wheat particles. (Yes, these are fundamental particles, basic building blocks of the universe. Well, I did say it is a fictionalized account. It makes no difference to the story what the basic substances – those things to which the bread is reducible – are, so I am simplifying.) Wheat particles are instances of wheat particle. And bread just is an aggregate of wheat particles. When the priest says the words of consecration, they all cease to be instances of wheat particle, but the characteristic properties associated with being a wheat particle remain held in place by an act of God. So the supervenient breadish properties remain in place, too. But there is no bread remaining, since there are no wheat particles remaining, and bread just is an aggregate of wheat particles.

14. Aquinas Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 94. The translation is from On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, II, James Anderson (trans.) (New York NY: Doubleday, 1955).

15. ST, III, 76, 5. The translation of the ST I will use in this paper is The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, 2nd edn, Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.), 1920, online at New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html

16. ST, Suppl. 85, 3. Also: ‘whoever has a glorified body has it in his power to be seen when he so wishes, and not to be seen when he does not wish it’; ST, III, 54, 1 ad 2.

17. ST, Suppl. 83, 6.

18. One might think there is a disanalogy between the two cases, in that the tiger infant's physical structure explains its ability to develop into a meat-eater, while we humans have no physical structure that explains our ability to develop into things that can become invisible. It's true we have no such physical structure, but we do have a non-physical structure that explains it – namely, the soul. As St Thomas Aquinas says, the reason our glorified bodies will have such odd powers is that the body will be wholly under the power of the soul. So it is a different kind of case, but, then, it should be.

19. Needless to say, this leaves certain problems unsolved. Is the whole Christ present in every host, or just part of Christ? If the whole, how can Christ be multiply located? If a part, which part? And so on. (For some fascinating discussion of such questions, see Pruss ‘The Eucharist’.) These questions, while important, are of a quite different sort than the questions I want to address here. I am not giving a complete theory of the Eucharist, but simply defending the view against certain objections.

20. However, even if such a case could be made, St Thomas Aquinas has another move available. He writes: ‘Christ's body is substantially present in this sacrament. But substance, as such, is not visible to the bodily eye, nor does it come under any one of the senses, nor under the imagination, but solely under the intellect, whose object is “what a thing is”; De Anima, iii. And therefore, properly speaking, Christ's body, according to the mode of being which it has in this sacrament, is perceptible neither by the sense nor by the imagination, but only by the intellect, which is called the spiritual eye; ST, III, 76, 7. Because the mode of Christ's presence is after the manner of substance, one should not expect to see him anyway. You can't see substance. Taking this line would unnecessarily complicate things here, since the claim that we can't see substance might seem to conflict with a claim made by Broackes in the following section. I do not think there is a real conflict, but I don't wish to follow that particular rabbit trail in this paper.

21. Anthony Kenny A Path From Rome (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1985), 72.

22. Broackes ‘Substance’, 156.

23. ibid., 162.

24. ibid., 163.

25. ST, III, 77, 1

26. Ott Fundamentals, 75.

27. ibid.

28. For a nice discussion of this point, see Sullivan, T. D. and Reedy, Jeremiah ‘The ontology of the Eucharist’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 65 (1991), 373–386CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 374–378.

29. My claims here resemble the view of Sullivan and Reedy ‘Ontology’, 373–386.

30. For much more on this material, see Toner, Patrick ‘Emergent substance’, Philosophical Studies, 141 (2008), 281–297CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem ‘On Substance’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming); and idem ‘Independence accounts of substance and substantial parts’, Philosophical Studies (forthcoming).

31. I presented this paper at the 2007 meeting of the Society for Catholicism and Analytical Philosophy in Milwaukee and at the 2009 Calvin College summer seminar, ‘Philosophical Reflections on Liturgy’. My thanks to participants at both events, especially to Michael Gorman, who was my commentator at the former. I also benefited from suggestions from Peter Byrne and Thomas Flint.