Abstract
Catholic doctrine makes metaphysical claims about the Eucharist, but the distinctive language of “transubstantiation” is often treated as an historically contingent, and disposable, way of articulating these claims. Attempts to translate the metaphysics implied by “transubstantiation” into other terminology should begin by attending to the semantic assumptions of those who first articulated it. This chapter argues that the notion of substantial predication in realist semantics helps communicate a metaphysical claim which even well-intended efforts at translation into other semantic frameworks often fail to capture. An implication of the argument is that, not only does realist semantics help us understand the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation helps us recapture realist semantics and the Aristotelian notion of substance.
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Notes
- 1.
Here and in the following several paragraphs, the intention is to articulate general theoretical possibilities, not necessarily to target a specific, historically entertained position. Still, presumably what this describes has at least a family resemblance to some historical positions, such as that of John Wyclif (who insisted that the bread itself must persist through the Eucharistic conversion) and modern “transignification” accounts which make the presence of Christ in the Eucharist depend on the notion of “symbol” or “sign” (instead of the sacrament’s function as sign being dependent on an underlying reality of presence). See for instance Schillebeeckx, 1968, 99: “The metaphysical interpretation of transubstantiation must be dissociated from the categories of natural philosophy, while the fundamental realism contained in it must be apparent at the level of sacramental symbolic activity—as a reality appearing in a sign.”
- 2.
Again, the idea here is to articulate a theoretical possibility, without necessarily locating it in particular historical assertions; but also again, presumably such possibilities seem to have been historically implied—either as benefits of, or as criticisms of—certain accounts of Eucharistic presence.
- 3.
“…it is not permissible… to concentrate on the notion of sacramental sign as if the symbolism—which no one will deny is certainly present in the Most Blessed Eucharist—fully expressed and exhausted the manner of Christ’s presence in this Sacrament; or to discuss the mystery of transubstantiation without mentioning what the Council of Trent had to say about the marvelous conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body and the whole substance of the wine into the Blood of Christ, as if they involve nothing more than ‘transignification,’ or ‘transfinalization’ as they call it …” Pope Paul VI, Mysterium Fidei, September 3, 1965.
- 4.
This phenomenon, sometimes described in twentieth century analytic philosophy as “Cambridge changes” (in Peter Geach’s phrase) was widely recognized by medieval thinkers; cf. Henninger, 1989.
- 5.
It should be obvious too that unlike the hypothesized interpretations of presence described earlier, this sort of change would necessarily depend on divine action, since it is a sort of change that could be effected neither by natural physical processes nor by individual or collective acts of human will.
- 6.
So, for instance, a Catholic theologian can treat Aquinas as exercising a “metaphysical option,” a “methodological decision to treat the Eucharist in terms of the metaphysics of being,” which was not only not necessary but actually harmful insofar as it “precludes the possibility” of interpreting the Eucharist in its full significance as celebration, sacrifice, or meal (Mazza, 1999, 209). Against this, see Wawrykow, forthcoming.
- 7.
Bruce Marshall summarizes a view common among Catholic theologians:
The basic worry about “substance” seems to be twofold. The term belongs in the realm of metaphysics, and its use loads Catholic Eucharistic doctrine with philosophical technicalities precisely at a point of unsurpassable practical and pastoral significance. Still worse, the “substantialist” metaphysics with which Trent’s language burdens Catholic doctrine is at best markedly problematic, if not simply flawed and outmoded beyond recovery.
Nonetheless Trent’s apparently official teaching on “transubstantiation” can be finessed: “Trent’s chapters and canons on the Eucharist do not use the term ‘substance’ in a technical way, nor do they mandate, or even invoke, any particular metaphysical construal of the concept of substance” (Marshall, 2014, 16). This common modern “embarrassment” about the language of transubstantiation is well described, and criticized, in Hemming, 2000.
- 8.
This chapter also develops an argument I originally made in Hochschild, 2014.
- 9.
The quoted phrases are from I.26 of Bacon’s Novum Organum. I.19 summarizes the distinction: “There are, and can be, only two ways to investigate and discover truth. The one [viz. anticipation of nature, which Bacon associates with Aristotle] leaps from sense and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles and their settled truth, determines and discovers inter-mediate axioms; this is the current way. The other [viz. interpretation of nature, the new method Bacon proposes to replace Aristotle] elicits axioms from sense and particulars, rising in a gradual and unbroken ascent to arrive at last at the most general axioms; this is the true way, but it has not been tried” (Bacon, 2000, 36). For Bacon’s critique of Aristotle, see for example I.54 and I.63; for explicit critique of formal and final causes, see for example I.48 and II.2.
- 10.
As Aristotle suggests at Metaphysics A.4 (985b10), where he characterizes the atomists’ description of all change in terms of an underlying substance modified to take on different accidents. Thus, what in one sense looks like an alternative to Aristotelian metaphysics (atomism) can actually be conceived in Aristotle’s idiom as only a particular hypothesis about the material constitution of things, a hypothesis which can be easily translated in terms of the Aristotelian metaphysical framework distinguishing substantial from accidental being: so-called “atoms” thus conceived would be the only true substances, with no inherent accidents, but which take on relational accidents depending on their arrangement with respect to other atoms, so that “things” made of atoms (like bread and animals) would not properly be substances but accidental unities made up of arrangements of substances (atoms). Cf. Met. Z.2 where Aristotle accepts that it remains an open question which things actually count as substances, but points out that the question itself cannot be formulated without relying on the distinction between substance and accident, and so the question serves as an invitation to better understand what substance is.
- 11.
Even if we recognize that part of what Aristotle accomplished was to clarify different senses of “substance” and the different ways that meanings of substance could be primary (Walshe, 2017–18), we can understand that as revealing and articulating truths about and latent in—not imposing a theory of substance on, as if to obscure or replace—a pre-philosophical understanding of substance.
- 12.
For a survey of some representative attempts to define contemporary metaphysics without any reference to substance, see Hochschild, 2014, 3–5.
- 13.
To adopt some of the helpful terminology of Richard Cross in his contribution to this volume, for Aquinas, accidents can serve as truth-makers insofar as they are modes of being, related to the very different mode of being of substance. Scotus effectively separates the two roles—the status of accidents as beings and their role as truth-makers—in a way that makes it more difficult to distinguish accidents from substances in their status as beings.
- 14.
- 15.
Adams, 2010 closely analyzes metaphysical claims but without considering changing semantic assumptions.
- 16.
- 17.
In principle, it is still possible within the nominalist framework to sustain the distinction between substantial and accidental predicates, as it would also be in principle possible for a semantic realist to stipulate an identity between the significates of an accidental and a substantial predicate. The point is that a metaphysical conceptualization that is intrinsic to realist semantics is extrinsic to nominalist semantics. See Klima, 1991 and Klima, 1999.
- 18.
For the connection between the doctrine of transubstantiation and the function of the Eucharist in the life of the Church, including its pastoral and ecumenical implications, see Levering, 2005.
- 19.
A more obvious motive for Aquinas’s use of the language of “substance” is not attachment to Aristotelian categories but to “safeguard eucharistic truth…. Thomas is in fact quite thorough in his efforts to free the reader from inappropriate words” (Wawrykow, 1993, 89, 90).
- 20.
A measure of the loss of the notion of substance is that Aquinas found it necessary to defend the idea that bread is a substance, since he understood (what modern discussions of substance often do not) that artificial things (insofar as they received their unity accidentally, from human will) are not substances (see ST III, q. 75, a. 6, ad 1, and discussion in Hochschild, 2014, 16–17). That bread is a substance is also implicit in its genuine unity, part of its fittingness as the matter of the sacrament (see ST III, q. 74, a. 1, corp.).
- 21.
“While he employs a philosophical term to express the presence, the affirmation of substantial presence is made on the basis of Scripture, in particular the institution narrative” (Wawrykow, 2005a, 125).
- 22.
We find in Aquinas a distinction between “predication by identity” and “predication by inherence” (or “predication by information”) (e.g., Super Sent. III, d. 5, q. 3, a. 3, expos.), and Aquinas can thus analyze the truth of affirmative propositions both in terms of the identity of the supposita of their terms, and in terms of the inherence of the form signified in those supposita (cf. ST I, q. 13, a. 12, corp.).
- 23.
Quine, 1960, 117, cites ST I, q. 40, a. 1, ob. 3 (“when several things are identical, what is predicated of one is predicated of the others”), in support of the claim that Aquinas offers a definition of the “is” of identity distinct from the “is” of predication. In fact, Aquinas does not there say that an identity statement is one whose two terms (subject and predicate) have the same referent. He says instead that if two things are identical then they can receive all the same predicates. The passage provides neither a basis for thinking that Aquinas is trying to define “the ‘is’ of identity” nor that he would distinguish identity statements from predications as irreducibly different forms of predication; rather, it provides clear evidence that Aquinas is willing to articulate identity in terms of predication: the inherence of the form in the object is causally responsible for the truth of the identity predication. So a Thomistic approach to analyzing statements differs from a Fregean/Quinean approach by treating the distinction between identity claims and predicative claims as equally viable and compatible semantic analyses of any true propositions, rather than as two irreducibly different and mutually exclusive logical forms of statements.
- 24.
This (accidental) nominalism is exactly what we find in Marshall, 2014, as I argued in Hochschild, 2014. Medieval (intentional) nominalists did not altogether ignore the distinction between substance and accident to this extent, but that distinction was not embedded directly in, as essential to, the nominalist semantic analysis of the signification of terms; rather, that distinction was accepted from the tradition of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology, logically independent of and thus conceptually arbitrary with respect to) the semantic analysis of terms within the nominalist account. (On this, and its often inadvertent implications for theology and the relationship between faith and reason, see Klima, 2009.) To the extent that many of the metaphysical questions that naturally emerge within the realist semantic framework would not arise from the nominalist one, that may very well have been the point as far as the nominalists are concerned, insofar as their motivation was the elimination of “quaestiones inutiles positae ex ignorantia logicae.” But of course, this only raises again the question of whether the kinds of metaphysical theological issues which arise for Aquinas naturally within the realist conceptual framework, and so are addressed in the Summa Theologia, are indeed “useless.”
- 25.
According to which the substance of the bread remains but comes to be accompanied by the substance of Christ’s body. Cf. ST III, q. 75, a. 6.
- 26.
According to which the substance of bread is not converted into, but rather destroyed and replaced by, the substance of Christ’s body. Cf. ST III, q. 75, a. 3.
- 27.
I explore the relation between medieval logic and theology, especially in Aquinas, in Hochschild, 2020.
- 28.
The phrase, overused, has a very weak basis in Aquinas, and usually obscures more than it reveals. A necessary step toward clarity is to distinguish two senses of “analogy” in Aquinas, on which see Hochschild, 2019.
- 29.
Incidentally, here is also a solution to a seemingly tangential problem that Stephen Brock has raised about Cajetan’s commentary (Brock, 2001). Defending the Thomistic metaphysics of the Eucharist against the anti-Aristotelian objections of Germain Grisez, and otherwise finding Cajetan a helpful interpreter of Aquinas, Brock notes that in ST III, q. 75, a. 4, ad 3, speaking of God’s power to change form into form and matter into matter, Aquinas says “whatever there is of being in the one, the author of being can change into whatever there is of being in the other, withdrawing that whereby it was distinguished from the other.” In his commentary on this reply, Cajetan says Aquinas is speaking not of uncreated being but only of being as common to creatures (sect. VIII). Brock comments: “This leads him to say that it is possible for any created being to be converted into any other—an angel into a stone, for example. Evidently, he would even have to say that an angel can be converted into a color! If Thomas meant this, why would he say that the matter of the bread cannot be converted into the substantial form of the body of Christ, nor the substance of the bread into the accidents” (551). In solution of this puzzle we can interpret Cajetan’s claim such that it does not entail the alleged contradiction of Aquinas, nor the absurd notion of an angel being converted into a color: created being, common to all creatures, is nonetheless not generically common but analogical, and the fact that the being of one substance (an angel) could in principle be converted to the being of another substance (a stone) does not entail that the being of a substance could be converted to the being of an accident. Created being is common to substance and accident, but there is no specific difference distinguishing substance from accident that could be “withdrawn” by divine power to convert one into the other, while within the category of substance there is such a specific difference between immaterial and material substance.
- 30.
“In transubstantiation… God’s power is invoked, and a parallel is drawn with God’s very creation of things ex nihilo” (Wawrykow, 2005b, 160). The dependence of transubstantiation on divine action is especially emphasized in Wawrykow, forthcoming.
- 31.
In this sense, I consider my argument to complement and extend that of Anscombe, 1981; not only does Anscombe acknowledge that traditional metaphysical analysis was meant to highlight, not reduce or explain away, the mystery of the Eucharist, but she argues that the truth of transubstantiation, as a mystery, is evident even to a child who learns from observation to treat the Eucharist with reverence. In short, modern misunderstandings can only be cleared up by steps—philosophical and theological reflection as well as habits of worship—that retrieve lost ways of understanding. As Anscombe puts it, the truth of transubstantiation “is the mystery of the faith which is the same for the simple and the learned. For they believe the same, and what is grasped by the simple is not better understood by the learned: their service is to clear away the rubbish which the human reason so often throws in the way to create obstacles.”
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Hochschild, J.P. (2023). “Real Presence” Is Not Enough: Recovering the Lost Semantics of Transubstantiation. In: Klima, G. (eds) The Metaphysics and Theology of the Eucharist. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40250-0_19
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