Mystical Elevation: A Modern Perspective on the Ancient Doctrine of Transubstantiation

As the three-year period of Eucharistic revival in the United States nears its culmination, it seems an opportune moment to reflect on a noteworthy proposal related to the mystery of transubstantiation that has heretofore not received much attention. Having meditated on their work for years, I find it striking that three distinguished contemporary authors—Bishop Robert Barron, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, and Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI—advance similar versions of this fresh approach to articulating the ancient doctrine for today’s believers. Upon encountering it, some may find their interpretation too innovative, and perhaps that concern is not without merit. Yet, given the provenance of the thesis and how little attention it has received in both scholarly and lay circles, I believe it warrants careful consideration.

In a word, these authors share the conviction that transubstantiation might be more profoundly understood if we approach it beyond the confines of a strictly Aristotelian framework. Their goal is not to do away with the Church’s classical understanding, but to complement it by emphasizing that the Real Presence is not the result of an inner-worldly transformation of one substance into another at the same level of being. This intriguing perspective suggests that transubstantiation is best conceived as the elevation of nature to a higher ontological plane, a lifting of creation above itself resulting in a non-competitive presence of God within the created order. In the following discussion, I will outline key aspects of this vision as presented by Bishop Barron, Monsignor Sokolowski, and Pope Benedict.

Elevated to a Higher Order: Benedict XVI on Transubstantiation

As a testament to how central he considered it for Christian life, Pope Benedict XVI made the Eucharistic communion the subject of one of his final essays penned in retirement and published only after his death. Even in his final days, the emeritus pontiff continued to meditate on the most fundamental truths of the faith, ever concerned with finding ways to present them to the faithful in powerful yet accessible language.

Combining his characteristic simplicity and profound depth, Benedict asked: “What, in reality, is the offering of the Supper or, respectively, of the celebration of the Mass?” The emeritus pontiff’s response is fascinating. For, while by no means opposing earlier magisterial teaching, the manner in which he described the mystery of transubstantiation stands out in relation to what we find in traditional sources like the Council of Trent:

[W]hat happens to the bread and wine in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist? Something is not added to them temporarily, but rather bread and wine are snatched away from the things of this world so as to enter into the new world of the risen Jesus Christ. . . . [The] bread and wine are no longer created realities of this world that consist in themselves, but rather are bearers of the mysteriously real form of the Risen Lord.[1]

These words are but a short distillation of a theological vision that Ratzinger elaborated in greater depth at various points during his active ministry. For instance, in the tremendous little book God is Near Us, Cardinal Ratzinger exhibited a special sensitivity to doubts faced by the faithful, and this awareness prompted him to address a series of obstacles to belief in the real presence of the Lord. Far from being “a matter of indulging a taste for difficulties,” Ratzinger insisted that reflecting on these is crucial for evangelization and is carried out “in order to learn anew and more profoundly the Yes of faith, to receive anew its joy and thus to learn anew once more to pray and to know the Eucharist itself.”[2]

The third and final of these challenges confronted by Ratzinger is especially crucial today, as it touches on the claim that the doctrine of the Real Presence has no place in a modern scientific worldview. In Ratzinger’s words, this same blunt question can be framed in several different ways:

Has the teaching about the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharistic gifts not long been refuted, rendered obsolete, by science? Has the Church not, with her concept of substance—for she speaks of “transubstantiation”—fettered herself, to far too great an extent, to a science that is basically primitive and obsolete? Do we not know precisely how material is constituted: made up of atoms, and these of elementary particles? That bread is not a “substance,” and, in consequence, none of the rest of it can possibly be true?[3]

In response, the cardinal opened with a reflection on what the Church means and does not mean with the words “substance” and “transubstantiation,” noting that the word “substance” was initially adopted by the Church “precisely to avoid the naïveté associated with what we can touch or measure”—to avoid the misapprehension that we “eat flesh, as cannibals would do.”[4] Having ruled out this misconstrual of the Real Presence, Ratzinger characteristically paused to reflect on the providence surrounding such mistaken attempts to capture the Eucharistic mystery. Even as errors are not intrinsically desirable, the cardinal observed that disputes like these have nevertheless “helped the Church to develop a more profound understanding of reality.”[5] Echoing the thought of one his favorite theologians, John Henry Newman, Ratzinger adds that this struggle indeed contributed positively to the development of doctrine in the Church—of making explicit truths that had hitherto been held truly but only implicitly:

After wrestling with the difficulty, the insight was made explicit: “Reality” is not just what we can measure. It is not only “quanta,” quantifiable entities, that are real; on the contrary, these are always only manifestations of the hidden mystery of true being. But here, where Christ meets us, we have to do with this true being. This is what was being expressed with the word “substance.” This does not refer to the quanta, but to the profound and fundamental basis of being. Jesus is not there like a piece of meat, not in the realm of what can be measured and quantified. Anyone who conceives of reality as being like that is deceiving himself about it and about himself. . . . Concerning the Eucharist it is said to us: The substance is transformed, that is to say, the fundamental basis of its being. That is what is at stake, and not the superficial category, to which everything we can measure or touch belongs.[6]

From here, Ratzinger sets out to offer a more constructive response to his initial query: “[W]e have taken a good step forward but have still not yet got there. For we now know what is not meant, but the question remains: How is this to be understood, in a positive sense?”[7] The tentative answer that follows is intriguing. While not renouncing the Medieval theology of transubstantiation (indeed, he begins here by praising Aquinas’s text for the liturgy of Corpus Christi), Ratzinger explains the doctrine in different language from that deployed by Thomas Aquinas. For example, the Bavarian theological giant does not dedicate space to discussing how the conversion of the Eucharistic species into the body and blood of Jesus Christ leaves only the accidents of bread and wine remaining. Instead, Ratzinger describes transubstantiation as the event in which the Lord takes ordinary bread and wine and lifts them up into an unfathomably higher order of existence:

What has always mattered to the Church is that a real transformation takes place here. Something genuinely happens in the Eucharist. There is something new there that was not before. Knowing about a transformation is part of the most basic eucharistic faith. Therefore it cannot be the case that the Body of Christ comes to add itself to the bread, as if bread and Body were two similar things that could exist as two “substances,” in the same way, side by side. Whenever the Body of Christ, that is, the risen and bodily Christ, comes, he is greater than the bread, other, not of the same order. The transformation happens, which affects the gifts we bring by taking them up into a higher order and changes them, even if we cannot measure what happens.[8]

Inspired by St. Augustine, at this point Ratzinger presents an analogy with bodily nourishment to spell out what is taking place here. He begins by recalling the saint’s experience in which a voice informed him, “I am the bread of the strong, eat me! But you will not transform me and make me part of you; rather, I will transform you and make you part of me.” Teasing out the theological implications of this event, Ratzinger explains that Eucharistic transubstantiation functions in the inverse manner of natural metabolic processes. In the ordinary course of things, a being of higher ontological status assimilates lower beings so that they become part of his own substance. But with Eucharistic communion it is the other way around: Christ lifts us beyond ourselves, drawing our lives into his.[9]

Ratzinger then adds these words on the question of how it can be that the Eucharistic species that have been “lifted” or “taken up,” undergoing substantial change while remaining the same from the standpoint of physical appearances:

When material things are taken into our body as nourishment, or for that matter whenever any material becomes part of a living organism, it remains the same, and yet as part of a new whole it is itself changed. Something similar happens here. The Lord takes possession of the bread and the wine; he lifts them up, as it were, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order; even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different.[10]

Bishop Barron and Monsignor Sokolowski: The Eucharist as Sacramental Prolongation of the Incarnation

In their own turn, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski and Bishop Robert Barron have made a stimulating suggestion that aligns remarkably well with Ratzinger’s perspective on transubstantiation. In concert with the Bavarian pontiff yet without any obvious dependence on him in this matter, these writers reject the notion that the Eucharistic transformation that happens at Mass is a matter of mere transignification or transfinalization. Like Ratzinger, they uphold the traditional doctrine that transubstantiation involves a real change at the level of being. This, of course, is to be expected from these faithful authors who affirm that the doctrines of the contemporary Magisterium stand in substantial continuity with teachings from traditional sources like the Council of Trent. The following, however, might surprise some readers.

Like the late pontiff, it appears that Barron and Sokolowski are not fully satisfied with a strictly Thomistic approach to articulating the Eucharistic mystery. Even as he continues to employ traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic language, Bishop Barron contends that an insufficient grasp of this framework can make it tempting to reduce Christ’s presence in the Eucharist to the same level of being occupied by physical creatures:

Within an Aristotelian framework, the Real Presence comes to be thought of as a sort inner-worldly change, some new and unprecedented way for finite natures—one spiritual and the other material—to relate to one another. But within the biblical context, things can make a bit more sense. For, in this reading, God is not one nature among others, one being within the world, but rather the Creator of the world, the ground of all finite things.[11]

At this juncture, the bishop references Monsignor Sokolowski, who urges us to beware of regarding our Lord’s Eucharistic presence as that of a worldly substance akin to that of any creature that we might encounter in this world:

The Real Presence in the Eucharist is therefore not just the concealed presence of one worldly substance under the appearances of another, but the presence of the full mystery of God’s being and his work, the mystery hidden from all ages and now made manifest to us, the point of the universe and of creation. It is this presence, this glory, that is the substance of the Eucharist and the core of the doctrine of Transubstantiation.[12]

In identifying this as the core of the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation, Barron and Sokolowski echo Ratzinger’s teaching that I unfolded above. As these theologians see it, our Lord’s Eucharistic presence is not such that he exists “in the same way, side by side” with the creatures he has made. The transubstantiated host is no longer on the same plane of being as the bread had previously existed, for it has been taken up into a higher order of reality through the sacrifice of the Mass.

Returning to Barron’s writing, the bishop proceeds by elaborating on an idea that Ratzinger only briefly touched on. Importantly, he recalls the Thomistic distinction between two orders of causality: divine and creaturely (i.e., God as the primary cause of all things and creatures as secondary or instrumental causes). However, Barron develops this in a direction that Aquinas did not explicitly go:

And thus God can relate to matter in a non-competitive way, becoming present through it without undermining it. The supreme instance of this non-competitive involvement of God within creation is, of course, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist is nothing but a sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation. Thus, God can use the material as a vehicle for his presence without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the matter that he uses. The Eucharist does not involve the supplanting of one finite nature by another—as though a tree becomes a leopard but continues to look and react like a tree—but the non-competitive presence of God within an aspect of nature he has made. . . . [W]hen the Church speaks of Christ being substantially present in the Eucharist, even as the material appearances of bread and wine remain, it is assuming this uniquely biblical perspective on the relation of spirit and matter.[13]

From this standpoint, understanding the doctrine of transubstantiation requires us to grasp that the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood is not the same sort of action by which bread might be transformed into some other creaturely being like a rock, tree, or cat. As Barron stresses, it is not as if one finite nature supplants another in the Eucharist but rather that God—who exists on an altogether higher order of being in comparison with creatures—becomes present in a non-competitive way “within an aspect of nature he has made.”

Note that Bishop Barron is not claiming to advance a position akin to the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Like Ratzinger and Sokolowski, Barron rejects the notion that the substances of ordinary bread and wine coexist alongside our Lord’s body and blood in the Eucharist. The bishop’s position would likewise distinguish itself from the theory of impanation, according to which Christ is present in the Eucharist through a substantial union of his human body with the substances of bread and wine. Rather than saying that God has been made bread (Deus panis factus), for Barron the nature of transubstantiation is such that the bread and wine as they previously existed have indeed been transformed and now exist on an altogether higher order of being.

In this connection, it is especially important and beautiful that Bishop Barron describes the Eucharist as “nothing but a sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation.” Often attributed to second-century Doctor of the Church St. Irenaeus of Lyon, this view invites us to consider our Lord’s presence in the Eucharist in an analogous way to the manner he dwelt on the earth as a man. As Christ’s human nature was not overwhelmed or destroyed but rather ennobled by its union with the divine person of the Word, this perspective holds that the Eucharistic species are transformed and elevated by virtue of their being “taken up” into the divine nature. As such, they are no longer the substance of bread and wine any more than Jesus Christ was substantially a human person. As there is no second hypostasis (no human person) in Jesus but only the divine person of the Word united to his human nature, after consecration the hypostases of bread and wine are truly gone—which is to say transubstantiated.

On the assumption that I have parsed this view correctly, questions nevertheless remain. For example, it would require more detailed work to explain how the above view does not in some way ultimately amount to “impanation.” Specifically, this perspective would benefit from further exploration regarding how it avoids suggesting that the physical characteristics of bread and wine are attributable to the person of the Word in the same way that Jesus’s skin and hair belong to his person.

Even granted these lingering issues, the proposal presented in various ways by Ratzinger, Barron, and Sokolowski is a welcome contribution toward unveiling the meaning of transubstantiation in language that is accessible to modern man. Whatever we may make of the intricacies surrounding the ins and outs of how precisely it all transpires, the overarching claim that the Eucharist extends the Incarnation through space and time is true and valuable. It provides us a way of envisioning that, just as God was made present in the world in his body, blood, soul, and divinity two thousand years ago, this presence continues to abide with us in the Eucharist.

Further, I find that this modern approach to transubstantiation in terms of elevation coheres well with the Christian conviction that the entire created order will one day be renewed and transfigured rather than subverted or destroyed (see Rom 8:21–22). Indeed, so bold was Ratzinger’s perspective on the eschatological end of creatures that he spoke of a time when the entire created order will one day be “transubstantiated” in heavenly glory.[14] On the solemnity of Corpus Christi, Benedict expounded on this concept by teaching that “this little piece of white Host . . . appears to us as a synthesis of creation” and that “in some way, we detect in the piece of bread, creation is projected towards divinization, toward the holy wedding feast, toward unification with the Creator himself.”[15] In a remarkable homily, the pontiff taught that the role of the priesthood is “to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy.”[16]

Conclusion

In closing, it is important to acknowledge that the perspective I have sketched in this essay is necessarily tentative. It is my attempt to distill the intriguing and converging proposals of three important thinkers who have sought to deepen contemporary Catholics’ understanding of and prayerful engagement with the Eucharist.

While the truth of the Real Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist itself is a datum of faith, the Catholic tradition leaves ample room for exploring the merits of particular explanations concerning this mystery. To recall the words of Ratzinger, dogmatic statements are essential, yet they also have a “signpost character” insofar as these authoritative teachings are nevertheless not exhaustive of the ineffable divine mystery.[17]

For a precise understanding of transubstantiation, it is hard to think of a better source than the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the pronouncements of the Council of Trent, and the teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, as I hope to have shown in this meditation, there are other valuable ways to think about this mystery, a few indications of which have been provided in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, and Bishop Robert Barron. According to these contemporary believers, in pondering transubstantiation it is more constructive to think of this transformation as the elevation rather than the loss of bread and wine. In the words of Ratzinger, the Eucharistic species are “snatched away from the things of this world so as to enter into the new world of the risen Jesus Christ.”

Finally, for those who may still feel unsure about the merits of the above proposals, let us recall Ratzinger’s frank acknowledgment that “it is not necessary for each person always to think through every intellectual point that is grappled with in the Church.” Thanks be to God, embracing the Church’s belief in our Lord’s Eucharistic presence does not require an exhaustive grasp of every feature of ecclesial doctrine. Rather, as Ratzinger affirms, “What matters is that the framework of thought is still intact, for it helps us to live out joyfully, without anxiety, the real heart of the faith that it supports.” With his deep pastoral sensibility, Ratzinger sought not to provide a definitive treatise on transubstantiation but simply to “point out a couple of things” regarding this mystery with keen awareness that our limitations as finite creatures “only allow us hesitant ventures toward this mystery.”[18]