Substance, Accident, and Transubstantiation

by
Peter A. Kwasniewski


Abraham Bloemaert, Supper at Emmaus

The priest celebrating the traditional Roman Rite whispers in the midst of consecrating the Precious Blood: “mysterium fidei.” Indeed, the Real Presence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist is among the greatest mysteries of our faith. Over the millennia the Catholic Church has lovingly pondered this mystery, and her great theologians, while humbly acknowledging reason’s limits in probing what is divine and supernatural, have nevertheless been able to offer a reasoned defense of it against all objections that unbelief and heresy have hurled against it. In the modern world, where materialism, scientism, skepticism, and similar views reign supreme, the mysterious change that the Church calls “transubstantiation” has its mockers and would-be debunkers — even, sadly, conscientious or de facto dissenters within the ranks of the Church, such as the modernists who populate many a Catholic university, seminary, or chancery. As Catholics who seek to understand and live our faith more deeply, we need to make an effort to get hold of the common-sense philosophy of reality that provides the Church with the raw materials for her dogmatic definition of transubstantiation. If we do this, we stand a better chance of achieving clear (or in any case, clearer) thinking about this wondrous work of God and thus of being in a position to speak of it to others. In his encyclical Mysterium Fidei (1965), Pope Paul VI said, apropos the Magisterium’s use of philosophically refined language in formulating Eucharistic dogma:

These formulas [of the Council of Trent] — like the others that the Church used to propose the dogmas of faith — express concepts that are not tied to a certain specific form of human culture, or to a certain level of scientific progress, or to one or another theological school. Instead they set forth what the human mind grasps of reality through necessary and universal experience and what it expresses in apt and exact words, whether it be in ordinary or more refined language. For this reason, these formulas are adapted to all men of all times and all places. (§24)

This article will attempt to show just what the Church’s formulas mean and how the mystery, while never ceasing to be a marvel and a miracle past all human thought, can nonetheless be clarified to the mind so that it no longer seems a colossal contradiction or impossibility. In short, we offer to the reader a modest essay in what the Father of Scholasticism, St. Anselm, called “faith seeking understanding.”

[Read the rest of this article here: "Substance, Accident, and Transubstantiation" (Scripture and Catholic Tradition, July 5, 2009), reprinted there by permission of Peter A. Kwasniewski and Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]