It has been observed in passing that the great post-Tridentine theologians of the Church of Rome have adhered to the Tridentine teaching in regard to the Eucharistic presence; and it has not been necessary to dwell at any length on what they have thus said. The reality of the presence of the body and blood of Christ, the conversion of the whole substance of the bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood by Transubstantiation, the continued existence of the species of bread and wine without their natural substance but with their natural properties and forces, the spiritual and supernatural manner of the presence and change, have been steadily maintained. It remains to notice some bye-paths of thought and points of interest on the subject of the Eucharistic presence since the time of the Council of Trent.
1. The Council of Pistoia affirmed the cessation of the existence of the whole substance of bread and wine, the presence of the whole Christ in each species and in every fragment of either species when divided, and the fact that in the Eucharist “the body of Christ is not a natural (animale) body but spiritual, and life-giving, and that it is in the Eucharist not after the manner of a natural (naturale) body but after a supernatural and spiritual manner”. The word Transubstantiation was not used, and pastors were exhorted to avoid scholastic questions in instructing their people. This statement was condemned by Pope Pius VI. in the Bull Auctorem fidei because of the lack of any mention of Transubstantiation or conversion, and described as “hurtful, derogatory to the exposition of Catholic truth about the dogma of Transubstantiation, favouring heretics”—
“insofar as by an ill-advised and suspicious omission of this kind the knowledge both of an article pertaining to faith and of a word consecrated by the Church to protect its profession against heretics is taken away, and as it tends therefore to produce forgetfulness of it, as if it were a matter of a merely scholastic question.”
2. The Cartesian philosophy with its theory of existence as dependent on consciousness was widely prevalent in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Such a theory not unnaturally affected the ideas about the Eucharist of those who held it, and the notion which Emmanuel Maignan appears to have adopted, that the accidents were real only to consciousness and without actually existing were impressed on the senses by God, was due to it. Apart from certain difficult questions as to the method of the existence and influence of the accidents, the theologians of the Church of Rome have been agreed; and they have concurred in teaching, in accordance with the Tridentine Catechism, that the accidents have real existence and entity. This fact may be illustrated by quoting from writers who do not altogether agree on the philosophical questions concerning the method of the existence and influence of the accidents, namely, Cardinal Franzelin, Dr. van Noort, Dr. Wilhelm and Dr. Scannell, and Bishop Hedley.
Cardinal Franzelin writes:—
“The fathers and the Universal Church constantly distinguish two things in the Sacrament, the visible part, which is the Sacrament only, and the invisible part, the body of Christ, which is both the Sacrament and the thing of the Sacrament.… The Sacrament is understood by all to be some sensible objective thing, not a modification in our senses and in surrounding objects. They gain nothing who say that the species are indeed something objectively real and not only a modification in our senses and in surrounding objects but that this objective reality is nothing else than the operation of God from that space where the bread was before. For the operation of God as distinct from its effect is nothing else than God Himself, and no one has said that God Himself, however He may be formally viewed as working, is a sacrament or sensible sign of a sacred thing! On this hypothesis therefore no objective reality outside our senses and besides the modifications of surrounding bodies which can be called a Sacrament remains.… To this conviction of the objective reality of the visible part of the Sacrament not only does the general sense of the ordinary terminology of the Church correspond; … but there are also in the fathers frequent and most skilful declarations of the physical reality of the sensible species and explanations of this in harmony with the desition of the substance of the bread and wine.”
Dr. van Noort says:—
“Since the accidents, which are the proper object of sensible cognition, really remain, and since the intellect, the proper object of which is the substance, is preserved from error by means of faith, there is no deception either of the senses or of the mind in the Holy Sacrament. Wherefore it is in an improper sense only that we sing, ‘Sight, taste, touch in Thee are deceived’.”
Dr. Wilhelm and Dr. Scannell write:—
“We need not here enter into the philosophical or scientific bearings of Transubstantiation. We may observe that the doctrine is inconsistent only with idealism, and that it is not bound up with any ultra-realistic theories. The Council of Trent, when defining the change of substance, studiously avoids the use of the term ‘accident,’ the usual scholastic correlative of substance, and speaks of ‘species’ (εἶδος), appearances, or phenomena. It is commonly held, however, that these are not merely subjective impressions, but have some sort of corresponding reality.”
Bishop Hedley says:—
“After the consecration the qualities of the bread remain as external realities. It will not do to say that it is only our senses which continue—God being willing—to be affected just as if the bread were still there. Neither is it sufficient to say that the almighty power of God continues to excite in the air or the ether the same vibrations which were set in motion by the bread as long as it was there. Almighty God could certainly do all this. But the peremptory proof that this does not happen in the Holy Eucharist is that, if that were all, there would be no Sacrament. The Sacrament of the Eucharist lies in the consecrated species. Our Lord’s body is contained by them; but it is not that sacred body in and by itself that is the Sacrament. For a Sacrament is an ‘outward sign’; that is, it is something which is part of the world apprehended by sense. The species, therefore, which contain or present to sense that body which in itself is (in the Holy Eucharist) outside of and beyond all sensitive cognition, must be external and real. It would be impossible to understand how there could be a Sacrament if the vehicle of the Sacrament (so to speak) were only an excitation of the sense-nerve, or a motion of air-waves, seemingly produced by an external object, but really not so produced at all. It may be objected that after all the bread, which seems to produce them, is not there, and therefore there can be no reality producing them. But that is just the point. The substance of bread is no longer there; but what we hold is that the real qualities ‘remain’. This too is, no doubt, miraculous—a transcendent miracle. But we are not here concerned to diminish the number of miracles. We have to save the reality of the Sacrament.… Although the doctrine of the real presence requires … that the species, qualities, or accidents which survive the conversion must be more than forms of the mind or affections of the sensitive apparatus, yet that doctrine does not require that we should hold any special theory of sense-operation. What we must maintain may be thus expressed: Material substance is objective and not merely subjective; material substance has certain means of impressing the human sense; in the Eucharistic conversion the impression-force of the substance of bread remains just as it was after the bread has ceased to be. The only opponents, therefore, that the Catholic doctrine has amongst physicists are those who deny either that material force is an objective reality or that its impression-force is an objective reality. It is in this sense that the ‘accidents’ must be said to persist. And persisting thus, they continue to play the same part in the physical universe as they, or the elements to which they belong, would have played had there been no Eucharistic conversion. They impress the senses as before. They affect other material substances just as if the bread or the wine were still there. They are themselves subject to physical alteration from their surroundings; and if such alteration goes so far as to destroy them, or to leave them no longer such as bread or wine naturally possesses and demands, the Eucharistic presence itself ceases to be there beneath them.”
3. Parallel to the care taken to insist on the reality of the accidents of bread and wine in the consecrated Sacrament has been the rejection of views which have tended to minimise the Tridentine doctrine of the conversion of the whole substance of the elements of bread and wine. On 7th July, 1875, the Sacred Congregation issued a decree declaring that an explanation of Transubstantiation in the following terms was not to be tolerated:—
“1. As the formal state (ratio) of personality (hypostasis) is to be by itself (per se), or to exist by itself (per se), so the formal state (ratio) of substance is to be in itself, and not actually to be sustained in another as it were first subject; for these two are rightly to be distinguished: to be by itself (per se), which is the formal state (ratio) of personality (hypostasis), and to be in itself, which is the formal state (ratio) of substance.
“2. Wherefore, as the human nature in Christ is not personal (hypostasis), because it does not exist by itself (per se), but was assumed by a higher divine Person (hypostasis), so finite substance, for instance the substance of bread, ceases to be substance by this only, and without any other change of itself, that it is sustained supernaturally in something else so as no longer to be in itself but in something else as in a first subject.
“3. Hence the Transubstantiation or conversion of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord can be explained in this way, that the body of Christ, while it is substantially present in the Eucharist, sustains the nature of bread, which simply by this and without any other change of itself ceases to be substance, because it is no longer in itself but in something else sustaining it; and therefore the nature of bread indeed remains, but the formal state (ratio) of substance ceases in it; and therefore there are not two substances, but one only, namely, that of the body of Christ.
“4. Therefore in the Eucharist the matter and form of the elements of bread remain; but now, supernaturally existing in something else, they have not the state (ratio) of substance, but they have the state (ratio) of supernatural accident, not as if they should affect the body of Christ after the manner of natural accidents, but in this only that they are sustained by the body of Christ in the way which has been described.”
On 14th December, 1887, the Sacred Congregation issued a decree condemning forty propositions extracted from the works of Antonio Rosmini Serbati, of which the following concerned the Eucharist:—
“In the Sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of bread and wine becomes the real flesh and real blood of Christ, when Christ makes it the end of His principle of perception (eam facit terminum sui principii sentientis), and quickens it with His life, much in the way in which bread and wine are transubstantiated into our flesh and blood, because they become the end of our principle of perception (fiunt terminus nostri principii sentientis).
“When the Transubstantiation is completed, it can be understood that there is added to the glorious body of Christ some part incorporated in it, undivided, and equally glorious.
“In the Sacrament of the Eucharist, by the force of the words the body and blood of Christ is only in that measure which corresponds to the quantity of the substance of bread and wine which is transubstantiated; the rest of the body of Christ is there by concomitance.
“Since he who does not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood has not life in him, and since none the less they who die with the Baptism of water or of blood or of desire undoubtedly attain eternal life, it must be said that to those who in this life have not eaten the body and blood of Christ this heavenly food is supplied in the future life at the very moment of death. Hence also to the saints of the Old Testament Christ could communicate Himself under the species of bread and wine when descending to hell, in order to make them fit for the vision of God.”
A more recent speculation of the Abbé Georgel, to some extent resembling ideas of St. Gregory of Nyssa, that the substance of the bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ because the almighty power of God incorporates them into Christ in much the same way in which our Lord during His mortal life incorporated food into Himself, is not without affinities to the views thus condemned. In this more recent speculation a distinction is made between the glorious body of Christ in heaven and the sacrificial state of His Eucharistic body on earth.
4. There has been an occasional tendency to deduce from the doctrine that the Eucharistic flesh and blood of our Lord are in very truth that sacred manhood which He received from the Blessed Virgin a theory of the presence and reception of the body of the Virgin in the Eucharist as well as of the body of her Son. A passage in the famous commentator Cornelis Cornelissen van den Steen, usually known as Cornelius a Lapide, who was born at Bocholt in 1567 and died at Rome in 1637, may have done something to encourage such an idea, although the writer probably did not mean more than that the flesh and blood in the Eucharist are of the body of which the Blessed Virgin is the mother. His words were:—
“As the saying ‘Those who eat me, shall still hunger’ is literally true of Christ, whom we eat in the Eucharist, and yet hunger for Him, and desire again to eat Him, so in like manner can it be said truly and literally of the Blessed Virgin. This is wonderful, but true. For as often as we eat the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist, so often do we actually eat in it the flesh of the Blessed Virgin; for the flesh of Christ is the flesh of the Blessed Virgin; yea, the very flesh of Christ, before it was detached from the Blessed Virgin in the Incarnation, and given to Christ, was the Blessed Virgin’s own flesh, and was informed and animated by her soul. As then we daily hunger for the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist, so also we hunger in it for the flesh of the Blessed Virgin, that we may drink in her virgin endowments and character, and incorporate them in ourselves. And not only priests and Religious, but also all Christians do this; for the Blessed Virgin feeds all in the Eucharist with her own flesh no less than with the flesh of Christ.”
An instance of speculative theology tending to encourage the same idea may be seen in a passage by the popular devotional writer Frederick William Faber, who was born in 1814, was ordained priest in the Church of England in 1839, became a Roman Catholic in 1845, and died in 1863.
“There is some portion of the precious blood which once was Mary’s own blood, and which remains still in our Blessed Lord, incredibly exalted by its union with His divine Person, yet still the same. This portion of Himself, it is piously believed, has not been allowed to undergo the usual changes of human substance.… He vouchsafed at Mass to show to St. Ignatius the very part of the host which had once belonged to the substance of Mary.”
The theory itself of the presence of the Blessed Virgin in the Eucharist has been actually formulated by some writers, of whom it may be sufficient to mention De Vega in the seventeenth century and Oswald in the nineteenth, and to quote the words of Oswald:—
“We maintain a presence of Mary in the Eucharist.… We are much inclined to believe an essential co-presence of Mary in her whole person, with body and soul, under the sacred species.… The blood of the Lord and the milk of His Virgin Mother are both present in the Sacrament.”
This theory has been viewed with disfavour by the theologians and authorities of the Church of Rome; it has at any rate on one occasion been condemned; the book of Oswald from which the above quotation is taken was placed on the Index of prohibited books; in a famous Letter Newman spoke of “the shocking notion that the Blessed Mary is present in the Holy Eucharist in the sense in which our Lord is present”.
5. Some of the theories which have been mentioned are not wholly without a tendency towards viewing the conversion in the Eucharist as a natural process and therefore towards a carnal way of regarding the Eucharistic presence. Traces of similar tendencies may be found elsewhere in occasional expressions or suggestions. Statements that our Lord in the Sacrament is “inseparably chained to the species” or “falls to the ground” if an accident takes place, or speculations whether in the Sacrament He uses His “senses” “naturally,” or “sees and hears in the natural manner,” are not altogether free from such tendencies, however much they may as a matter of fact be guarded by careful definitions made elsewhere by the same writers. A theory that, at the conversion of the substance, atoms of the body of Christ take the place of the chemical atoms thereby removed seems to indicate that the mental attitude underlying the theory is directed towards a natural process of a carnal kind. Against any such ideas, the ordinary teaching of theologians has asserted the spiritual character of the change in Transubstantiation and of the presence of the body of Christ.