Tim Troutman (formerly known as "The God Fearin' Fiddler") of The God Fearin' Forum has responded to my latest discussion of Eucharistic theology and Aristotle. Perhaps I have not been very clear. Whatever the case, Tim persistently misunderstands both my claim and my argument for it. I am going to try to make what I am claiming very clear here:
The doctrine of transubstantiation, as expounded by Trent, is rendered incoherent by any system of metaphysics sufficiently different from Aristotle's.
Now that I've cleared that up (I hope), let me further explicate my claim and argue for it again. In case you've forgotten, here is my claim:
The doctrine of transubstantiation, as expounded by Trent, is rendered incoherent by any system of metaphysics sufficiently different from Aristotle's.
The God Fearin' Fiddler has a post up on the historical significance of transubstantiation which has led to some interesting discussions. The principle problem with this post and the discussion that follows it, however, is that no one seems to understand the difference between transubstantiation and the Real Presence. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this either, but I do think I know enough to clear up some historical and metaphysical confusion. I am going to use two principal sources - session 13 of the Council of Trent, and the relevant article from the Catholic Encyclopedia - to explain the historical development and specific content of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and then attempt to show two things: (1) no such doctrine is affirmed by Ambrose in the passage the Fiddler likes to quote in this connection, and (2) it would be very difficult for Christians with strong Platonist leanings, such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and most early Christian theologians, to even make sense of this doctrine, which renders it highly unlikely that they implicitly accepted it, or that they would have accepted it had it been explained to them.
Let us begin with an outline of the history. From the beginning, Christians used the words Christ himself used in describing the Eucharist. Christ himself said "this is my body" and "this is my blood." This is in essentially all of the records of the words of institution, including 1 Corinthians 11:23-29, the passage most churches read before serving the Eucharist. Christ also speaks this way in John 6, which is one of the most important texts on the theology of the Eucharist.
Now, all Christians, including even Zwingli, have used and still use this language in describing the Eucharist, so it is important to note that if Zwinglian or similar interpretations will work for the text of the New Testament, they will also work for most writers who merely adopt the New Testament's language and don't attempt to describe it in any more detail. Zwingli specifically argued for a symbolic interpretation by pointing out all the places in Scripture where "is" is used to mean "signifies." There appears to be a more or less uncontestable example of this even in the words of institution themselves, as they are recorded in Luke. Jesus says "this cup is the new covenant" (Luke 22:20, emphasis added), but the cup clearly isn't actually the new covenant (how could it be?). Rather, it is the sign and seal of the new covenant. I don't think that either Catholic and Orthodox believers, who like to interpret the words of institution literally, or fundamentalists, who like to interpret everything but the words of institution literally, would want to say that the cup literally is the new covenant.
I am not an expert on patristics (though I am working on it), but I suspect that most of the fathers, especially the earlier ones, simply used the same language as Christ and didn't provide or attempt to provide much further analysis. The question at issue here doesn't hinge on whether we affirm these words to be true. All Christians agree on that. We all agree that these words express some important truth; we don't agree about what truth they express. (Actually, there is some agreement, but there is a lot of disagreement about the details.)
That said, a case can probably be made that many of the fathers explicitly affirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence (certainly at least a few of them did), and that no writings survive from an otherwise orthodox writer in the early period of Christianity who denies this doctrine. The doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the claim that these words are to be interpreted literally: the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is the blood of Christ. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, any attempt at further analysis meets with suspicion. However, as we shall see, the Roman Catholic Church has not only given a metaphysical theory of this doctrine, but has elevated that theory to the status of dogma (that is, all members of the Church are in principle required to assent to it).
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article, transubstantiation properly so-called (at least the details of the theory) is a uniquely Western doctrine. The word was first used by Hildebert of Tours around 1079. Note that this is contemporary with Anselm, the first of the Scholastics, but before the wide availability of the words of the Arab Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) and through him the works of Aristotle in the West. This will become significant later.
Of course, the history of the word is not a history of the doctrine. I have already outlined the doctrine of the Real Presence (it really is that simple). The Catholic Encyclopedia states that "the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation sets up a mighty bulwark around the dogma of the Real Presence and constitutes in itself a distinct doctrinal article, which is not involved in that of the Real Presence, though the doctrine of the Real Presence is necessarily contained in that of Transubstantiation." So when did this distinct doctrine develop? Before or after the use of the word? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an answer to that question, and I don't know enough about Anselm and friends to know whether the philosophical commitments of the 11th and 12th century Western Christian philosophers and theologians left room for full transubstantiation. However, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us that the word first entered Catholic dogmatic definitions at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but the text of that council says only "[Christ's] body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed [Lat. transsubstantiatio] by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of Him what He has received of us." Here we do have the word "form" (presumably Latin "forma") which is often a synonym of "species", a Scholastic/Aritotelian technical term used in later discussions of the doctrine. Nevertheless, since outside the technical jargon of scholasticism, "forma" just means "shape" and "species" just means "appearance," in order to show that the Fourth Lateran Council actually affirms transubstantiation as we know it today, rather than just using the word, it would have to be shown that the word already had the present day meaning. On the other hand, the word itself would seem to have some Aristotelian baggage (I promise I'm about to explain all of this - I apologize if anyone has to read this long post twice due to my poor organization): the bread and wine are not trans-formed - they retain their original form. Rather they are trans-substanced. The form remains the same, but the substance changes. This is the essence (that's another loaded term in Aristotle/Aquinas talk) of the doctrine. So it is probably affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council.
At any rate, it is quite clear in the Council of Trent in 1563. Here are some excerpts from the thirteenth session (translated by Philip Schaff):
Chapter I ... after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ ... is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things ...Chapter IV On Transubstantiation. And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which he offered under the species of bread to be truly his own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called transubstantiation.
The Canons anathematize anyone who disagrees with this (Canon II even anathematizes anyone who doesn't want to call it transubstantiation!), but don't really add anything.
Here is the metaphysical background: Aristotle was a proponent of what is called a "hylomorphic" metaphysics. That is, he affirmed that material objects were made up of "matter" (Gr. hylas) and "form" (Gr. morphos). There is a lot more complexity than this, but this is the basic idea. This is related to his distinction between "substance" or "essence" (Gr. ousia) and "accident" (I don't know the Greek word for this). The matter of an object is the stuff it's made out of, and it's form is its shape or organization. For the Scholastics, the Latin "species" seems to have been related to Aristotle's "form" but been more closely related to our cognition (the Catholic Encyclopedia article on this didn't make that much sense to me). Objects also have an essence, which is that in virtue of which it is the thing it is, and various accidents, or properties that could change without the object being destroyed. Often, the essence of an object is thought to be a collection of essential properties; thus I might be essentially human.
For the Scholastic/Aristotelian, the doctrine of transubstantiation is kind of weird, but no weirder than the Incarnation of the Trinity, and, more importantly, it is coherent. It is to be explained as follows: the substances or essences of the bread and wine are fully replaced by the substances or essences of the body and blood of Christ (I'm not sure if the matter is also replaced), but there is no change to the accidents, or to the form/species. Thus it still appears to be bread and wine, but it actually is the body and blood of Christ, since essence is what determines identity. Technically, the bread and wine are not changed into the body and blood, but replaced with the body and blood, since you can't change the essence of a thing and still have that same thing. Let me note that, while I'm not an expert on Aristotle, I suspect he would find it preposterous to claim that the essence of a material object could be replaced with another essence (and thus the material object be replaced with a different object) before our eyes without any perceptible difference in the matter before us.
Now we are going to examine Ambrose, and then the philosophical commitments of Augustine and his fellow Christian Platonists.
The Fiddler quotes Ambrose as saying:
Perhaps you will say, "I see something else, how is it that you assert that I receive the Body of Christ?" And this is the point which remains for us to prove. And what evidence shall we make use of? Let us prove that this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated, and the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because by blessing nature itself is changed.... [Ambrose discusses miracles performed by the prophets] ...
We observe, then, that grace has more power than nature, and yet so far we have only spoken of the grace of a prophet's blessing. But if the blessing of man had such power as to change nature, what are we to say of that divine consecration where the very words of the Lord and Saviour operate? For that sacrament which you receive is made what it is by the word of Christ. But if the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature of the elements? You read concerning the making of the whole world: "He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created." Shall not the word of Christ, which was able to make out of nothing that which was not, be able to change things which already are into what they were not? For it is not less to give a new nature to things than to change them.
But why make use of arguments? Let us use the examples He gives, and by the example of the Incarnation prove the truth of the mystery. Did the course of nature proceed as usual when the Lord Jesus was born of Mary? If we look to the usual course, a woman ordinarily conceives after connection with a man. And this body which we make is that which was born of the Virgin. Why do you seek the order of nature in the Body of Christ, seeing that the Lord Jesus Himself was born of a Virgin, not according to nature? It is the true Flesh of Christ which crucified and buried, this is then truly the Sacrament of His Body.
The Lord Jesus Himself proclaims: "This is My Body." Before the blessing of the heavenly words another nature is spoken of, after the consecration the Body is signified. He Himself speaks of His Blood. Before the consecration it has another name,after it is called Blood. And you say, Amen, that is, It is true. Let the heart within confess what the mouth utters, let the soul feel what the voice speaks.
In order to show that Amborse accepts transubstantiation, we have to show that he explains the words "this is my body" by the claim that the form and accidents of the bread remain, but its essence has been replaced by the essence of the body of Christ. Do you see that in the above quotation? I don't see any such thing. Ambrose certainly affirms the Real Presence: he says that if God can become human flesh, certainly he can become bread. He says that we shouldn't be surprised if Christ's body doesn't follow the ordinary course of nature, since God often performs miracles in Scripture, and since even Christ's human birth did not follow the ordinary course of nature. But I see nothing here about form and matter, or about substance and accident, or about species. And I'm not just looking for the words, I'm looking for the content. All Ambrose says is "this may look like bread, but it's actually the body of Christ, and God certainly has the power to make what looks, feels, and tastes like bread into the body of Christ." That is the doctrine of the Real Presence.
The last thing I want to cover is the issue of the Platonist leanings of many of the early fathers, notably the Alexandrians and Augustine. I shouldn't have to take pains to show this, because the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "even Augustine was deprived of a clear conception of Transubstantiation, so long as he was held in the bonds of Platonism." Nevertheless, I will at least try to explain it.
Platonism holds that material objects are what they are in virtue of their "participation" (more literally: "having a share") in a transcendant, changeless, immaterial "form" (not morphos, but eidos or idea, which Aristotle also uses, but in a somewhat different meaning than morphos, I think). You and I are both human because we participate in the form of Human, or, as Plato often says Humanity Itself. The bread is bread because of its relationship to Bread Itself. Things are, of course, generally participants in multiple forms, and everything is a participant in Goodness Itself to a greater or lesser degree because Plato holds to a privation theory of evil (which is where Augustine got it), so anything that had no goodness at all would not exist. Christian Platonists generally want to avoid the idea that the forms are co-eternal with and independent of God, so they say that they exist in God's understanding.
A Platonist does not have a concept of an essence as an Aristotelian does. Furthermore, Plato himself, and I believe most Platonists following him, generally cashes out "participation" in terms of "being patterned after." It is very difficult to see how the bread could change from being patterned after bread to being patterned after the body of Christ without any perceptible change. In what would the patterning consist? How does this object resemble a human body, and how Christ's body in particular? Now, there must be some way of getting this to work, because Father Nicolas Malebranche was a very intelligent Platonist Catholic priest in the 17th/18th century, after the Council of Trent, and he must have come up with something, but I don't know what he said.
At any rate, it is highly unlikely that any Christian Platonist held to anything like transubstantiation prior to Malebranche, and a great many of the early fathers, including, as I have said, the Alexandrian school and Augustine, were Platonists.
The situation is even worse for idealists such as myself (or 18th century Anglican Bishop George Berkeley). We don't believe that there is any such thing as the essence or substance or matter of the bread. All that exists, according to idealism, is what the Scholastics would call the "species." Transubstantiation is thus puzzling for the Aristotelian, more puzzling for the Platonist, and completely incoherent for the idealist. I should also note that most contemporary philosophers don't believe in any of these three theories, but transubstantiation is probably also incoherent for them, since material objects don't have undetectible essences (though they may have essential properties).
Now, a Christian idealist does have to come up with some explanation for the bodily resurrection and be able to say that the body that is raised is in some sense the same body although it is radically transformed in terms of its phenomenal properties. Whatever solution one comes up with for this problem could probably also be used to make sense of the doctrine of the Real Presence. However, this view cannot possibly look anything like transubstantiation, for the reasons discussed above.
I seem to have opened quite the can of worms in my post on Church dogma the other day when I said:
There seem to be some clear (to me) cases of Christian dogma that are not obviously uniquely deriveable from Scripture. For example, consider the formulation of the trinity as three persons (Greek hupostaseis and/or prosopa, Latin personae) in one substance/essence (Greek ousia, Latin essentia and/or substantia). This type of formulation is extremely common in the Christian tradition, and is derived primarily from the Chalcedonian Creed. However, I don't think we can say that it is obviously uniquely deriveable from Scripture; that is, there is no reason to say that someone looking at Scripture by some particular method that did not include granting some authority to tradition would lead many people to come independently to this conclusion. What is in Scripture is this paradox: the Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, the Holy Spirit is fully God, there is only one God. Any number of formulations of the solution could be compatible with the Scripture, but one in particular is generally believed to be part of Christian dogma.
I would posit that the doctrine of the Trinity of three persons and one substance is not a solution for the paradox, but just a restating of what the paradox is from scripture. I don't think Orthodoxy has gone too far from that. Just a restatement that we mostly accept as mystery.I think the danger comes to when we do try to explain that mystery. Like modalism where we say that the Father becomes Jesus and then the Holy Spirit. Or JW answer which is Jesus is not God but something else and the H.S. is just a power. In this particular dogma, when the mystery is tried to be solved, it creates problems.
Now let me be perfectly clear here: I absolutely do believe and am convinced that God exists as three co-equal and co-eternal Persons in a single Substance or Essence. It'sjust that I'm not always sure what I mean when I say that, and I've recently had some doubts about where that doctrine comes from. It seems to me, as I said, to be a clear case of Christian dogma, but what do we mean by it? Is it just a restatement of the paradox from Scripture?
As I see it, there are two ways that we can treat this statement. First, we can say something like "we know from Scripture that God is three in one sense, and yet one in another sense; let's call the concept under which he is three 'person' and the concept under which he is one 'substance.'" If we do this, we are doing nothing but restating the paradox from Scripture, as vangelicmonk says. However, we can't be sure that we are using the words 'person' and 'substance' in this context in the same way we use them in other contexts. This is perfectly ok with a lot of Christian thinkers. For instance, Thomas Aquinas thinks that when we speak about God we are always speaking by analogy. So, a Thomist could say some thing like: "when we say that God is three persons in one substance, we mean that there is some concept roughly analogous to the concept of 'person' as we ordinarily use it, such that if we consider God under that concept we will rightly state that he is three, but there is another concept, one roughly analogous to the concept of 'substance' such that if we consider God under it we will rightly say that God is one." (I'm not a Thomist, nor have I studied a lot of Medieval philosophy, so I'm not saying that a Thomist would say precisely that, but merely someone who agrees with Aquinas on this particular point could say that sort of thing.) Now, this makes a good deal of sense. Furthermore, the part where the threeness is analogous to 'person' can indeed be supported, to some degree, in Scripture: the Father and the Son are pictured talking to each other (e.g. in John 17) not in the way we talk to ourselves, but in the way we talk to others, and Jesus seems to speak of the Holy Spirit as though he were at least "roughly analogous" to a person in these latter chapters of John as well. There are other similar examples throughout Scripture. The concept of 'substance' is a much more difficult one; sometimes I'm not even sure I know what a substance (in the metaphysics sense, as opposed to the chemistry sense) is, but we can just go with it for now. So, perhaps we should say that a statement like the one above is a matter of dogma, but there is room for a great deal of disagreement as to just how good the analogies are. This seems like a very defensible position to me.
Alternatively, we could say that when we say that God exists as three Persons in one Substance we mean these words in the same way we mean them whenever we use them rigorously in this kind of metaphysical context (and statements about God are metaphysical statements). This needn't make any particular metaphysical system a matter of dogma (in fact, it had better not), it would simply say that if you are an orthodox Christian and you have a metaphysical system, your metaphysical system had better be able to account for this in its definitions of persons and substance. Now, the Bible doesn't use this kind of language (in fact, it doesn't even use English), so this couldn't possibly come from the Bible, and therefore can't be dogma under the Protestant idea, unless we think that Protestantism has room for saying that a disputable interpretation of Scripture can become dogma due to the authoritative status of the Church (that is, the true spiritual Church, not any particular hierarchy) as an interpreter, provided we realize that the Church continues to be less authoritative than the Bible itself. In this case, we might say that the formulation in English "three Persons, one Substance" was a matter of dogma, since all legitimate Christian communities that speak English affirm this (if, in fact, the broad, sweeping statement I've just made is true). Alternatively, of course, it could be that the Council of Chalcedon is an authoritative interpretation of Scripture, which might make its formulation, in the original Greek, a matter of dogma. I am of the belief that the word choice in the Chalcedonian Creed comes from Aristotle, so I hope eventually to go through Aristotle's Metaphysics and look at how each of the terms is used and see what meaning I can derive from Chalcedon on that basis, but I have no time right now, so let's assume for the sake of argument that the English formulation "three Persons in one Substance," where Person and Substance are used in precisely the same sense as in other metaphysical assertions, is a matter of dogma.
If this is the case, what we will do is proceed with an inquiry into the meaning of these terms by the methodology of analytic metaphysics (or some such) and then apply the results to doctrine. Note that, in this case, what the results have to be is not proscribed by dogma, but merely that if we get our metaphysics right with regard to other persons and substances, then we can apply the same definitions to God. It doesn't say under what circumstances our metaphysics is 'right.'
Now, I have argued previously that persons are in fact events, or, more specifically, connected series of mental states. A common definition of substance in metaphysics is "a center of causal power." Furthermore, I believe that God is atemporal, rather than merely everlasting. If we combine all three of these claims, we can get a very clear picture of God as Trinity: God, we will say, is a single center of causal power, existing in three separate eternal complex mental states. This is roughly analogous (here we go back to analogy) to three minds controlling a single body, but always agreeing on how to move it. God is only one set of causal powers, so it is a metaphysical impossibility that any Person of the Trinity should will anything by himself, without the other two. They must all will in unison. Since they cannot, metaphysically, act other than in unison, only having one set of causal powers, they are a single Being or Substance, but since there are three mental states, there are three Persons.
Now, even this detailed explanation doesn't really solve the mystery, it merely speculates on the meaning of three Persons in one Substance. I hope that it falls within the realm of orthodoxy, because I sort of tentatively accept it, and I would like to think that I am not a heretic, but it is certainly closer to wild speculation than to dogma.
The point that I'm trying to make is this: if God has in fact revealed that he exists as three Persons in one Substance, then he must expect us to understand something by the words 'person' and 'substance' in this context, and we should try to figure out what that is, as I did briefly above. If, on the other hand, God has revealed to us only that he is three in one, and we have simply plugged in the words 'person' and 'substance' as ciphers having no meaning external to the formulation in order to help us talk about it, then we should totally abandon this line of inquiry, because there is no way we can no anything about the internal nature of God apart from revelation. So this gives us basically three possible understandings of the formulation: (1) 'person' and 'substance' carry no external meaning into the formulat and are merely plugged in as a matter of convenience, (2) 'person' and 'substance' carry external meaning only by analogy to their ordinary usage, or (3) 'person' and 'substance' are used within the formulation in the same way they are ordinarily used outside of it. For each of these it is fair to ask whether the formulation is true under it, and also whether it is a matter of dogma under it. Each has problems.
Interpretation (1) can certainly be proven from Scripture, and is therefore certainly true and a matter of Christian dogma. However, if (1) is dogma and neither of the others are, then someone might refuse to say that God was "three Persons in one Substance," on account of the fact that it was misleading since these words had outside usages and we were here using them in ways unrelated to those outside usages. This person might wish instead to say that God was "three Wizboons in one Poobam" or some such, and we could not then consider this person a heretic. Does anyone else think this is a problem?
Interpretation (2) can be supported from Scripture, and I think the 'person' part can probably even be proven. However, I'm not sure the substance part can, but maybe I should ask someone who has a better idea what the heck a metaphysical substance is to figure that out. Besides this, you could still have someone insisting on saying that God was "three Wizboons in one Poobam" be orthodox, he would just have to acknowledge that a wizboon is sort of like a person, and a poobam is sort of like a substance. That actually doesn't seem that problematic to me, on the whole. I think interpretation (2) may be the best alternative.
I don't think interpretation (3) can be proven from Scripture, and the Scriptural support for it is very limited. However, it certainly doesn't contradict Scripture, and it may have the authority of the true Church behind it (though my Protestant ecclesiology makes that very difficult to determine).
So, to all of you who commented on the Church dogma post, and to all of you who didn't, which alternative do you take? Can the problems I've listed be solved, or are they not really problems? Or is there another alternative I'm not seeing?