The twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper, noting that what is most important in a thinker’s work can go unnoticed by interpreters because it “goes without saying” for the author, goes on to say of Thomas Aquinas, “The notion of creation determines and characterizes the interior structure of nearly all the basic concepts in Thomas’s philosophy of Being. And this fact is not evident; it is scarcely ever put forward explicitly; it belongs to the unexpressed in St. Thomas’s doctrine of Being.” While demurring from Pieper’s seeming restriction of this claim to the realm of Thomas’s “philosophy of Being,” I would want to affirm the importance of the idea of creation in all of Thomas’s thought, as well as Pieper’s observation that this can sometimes go unnoticed. We might say that the doctrine of creation displays with particular clarity the creator-creature relationship that constitutes the “grammar” of Thomas’s theology, a grammar that is at work, although often unnoticed, throughout that theology. In what follows, I want to show the importance of the grammar of creation for Thomas by means of a single example. After first briefly sketching how Thomas understands creation, I will turn to Thomas’s theology of Christ’s Eucharistic presence and an important modern critique of that theology to show how the grammar of creation is at play in his thought, as well as how inquiry into an area like sacramental theology might help us gain insight into the grammar of creation.
Creation: relatio quaedam ad Deum cum novitate essendi
What does Thomas mean when he speaks of “creation”? He does not mean most fundamentally the six days of creation, though he offers in the Summa theologiae an account of the days of creation that is highly interesting and, alas, too often overlooked. But because he always seeks to move beyond the simple repetition of sacred truths to a grasp of the fundamental principles involved—from knowing not simply what is the case to a deeper grasp of why it is the case—Thomas wants to know what it means for something to be “created.” To put it in a way that would not be alien to Thomas’s medieval Scholastic idiom, he is not satisfied with a “material” account of creation that explores the biblical creation narrative but offers as well a “formal” account of creation that seeks to define what creation is. To put it in yet another way, Thomas seeks not simply to repeat statements about God’s work of creation but to grasp the grammar of those statements. As David Burrell puts it, for Thomas, “the very structure of a well-formed sentence reflects the formal or constitutive features of the object spoken about.” The definition of createdness that Thomas works his way toward is, as he phrases it in his disputed questions De potentia, “a relation of something to God together with newness of existence [relatio quaedam ad Deum cum novitiate essendi],” and this definition can serve as an entry point for examining Aquinas’s “formal” or grammatical account of creation.
So, first, Thomas thinks of creation in terms of a relation between creator and creature, specifically “the very dependence of created being [esse creati] on the ultimate source [principium] from which it comes.” To be a creature is simply to have an existence that depends on another; conversely, the ultimate source of creatures must have a nondependent existence. In other words, to be a creature is to be contingent with regard to existence and to be the creator is to have a necessary existence, where “necessity” means not simply that a thing does not pass into or out of existence but rather that a thing has existence through itself and not through another. Drawing upon the insights of Avicenna, Thomas conceives of the contingency of creation in terms of the distinction between essence (essentia)—what a thing is—and existence (esse)—the fact that a thing is. Thomas’s argument for this distinction is, in brief, that one cannot fully understand what a thing is without knowing all of the essential parts of its definition (e.g., I can’t understand what human beings are if I only know that they are animals without knowing that they are also rational). But I can know what something is apart from knowing whether or not it exists (e.g., I can grasp the definition of a unicorn whether or not unicorns exist). Therefore, the fact of something’s existence is distinct from its essence, unless, he notes, there exists something the essence of which is existence itself. What this means is that existence is not an essential property of things. Their existence depends upon something else—ultimately upon something in which essence and existence are identical. The ultimate dependence of things upon something outside themselves for their existence, their “existence through another,” is the relation that Thomas calls “creation.”
Second, and following from this, creation has to do with the existence or “being [esse]” of things. Thomas notes, “God’s first effect in things is existence itself.” What God creates are not abstract essences but substances, concretely existing things. Thomas thinks of the distinction of essence and existence in terms of the distinction between potentially being something and actually being something. That is, just as the bronze that is potentially a statue can become an actual statue, so too an essence, which can potentially exist, can come to actually exist. So for Thomas, what it means for God to create is to bestow existence upon essences that are in themselves only potentially existing. Yet this existence is not an adventitious add-on to essences that somehow pre-exist; the essences are constituted as actual in the bestowal of existence. In this sense, creation is ex nihilo—not in the sense that there is a “nothing” that pre-exists creation but rather that creatures are, apart from the actualization of their existence by God, nothing.
Third, as implied by this view on what it means for creation to be ex nihilo, Thomas thinks that the notion of creation itself does not necessarily imply a temporal beginning to the world. The issue of what is often called “the eternity of the world” was hotly contested in the Middle Ages, not least because the infinite temporal duration of the world was the nearly unanimous view of the Greek philosophical heritage, whether understood in terms of eternal matter to which God gives form (Plato) or eternally existing substances in motion (Aristotle). Some, including the Arabic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, as well as their thirteenth-century followers who are referred to as “Latin Averroists,” followed Aristotle in seeing the universe and its motion as being of infinite duration. Others, including Al Ghazali in the Arabic-speaking world and Bonaventure among the thirteenth-century Scholastics, held that the eternity of the world and of motion not only contradicted divine revelation but was philosophically incoherent (implying things like an actual infinity of immortal souls), and also seemed to give creation a kind of necessity that rivaled God’s. Thomas, along with Moses Maimonides, holds the position that, while we know from Scripture that the world is not infinite in temporal duration but rather is created “in the beginning,” there is nothing in itself incoherent in the notion of a creation that exists eternally without a beginning or end in time, and therefore neither the eternity nor non-eternity of the world can be either proved or disproved. We might say that the grammar of creation does not necessarily include tense, being solely concerned with dependence upon God, which could conceivably be an eternal dependence. In this way, the beginning of the world’s duration in time belongs to the “material” account of creation rather than to the “formal” account.
Fourth, if “creation” does not necessarily imply temporal beginning, what then does Thomas mean when he includes cum novitate essendi (“with newness of existence”) in his definition of existence? What is key for Thomas, and will become important in our discussion of his Eucharistic theology, is that creation is not simply a transformation of something that already exists—such as a calf growing into a cow or a cow being made into a hamburger—but rather the radical origin of things. The inclusion of “newness of existence” speaks not to temporal origin but to the fact that existence is imparted by God apart from any preexisting condition or potential. When we speak of creation as the actualization of potential to exist, we are speaking of “potential” in the sense of the non-impossibility that, for example, a triangle has to be three-sided (as opposed to two- or four-sided), and not of the potential of a calf to grow into a cow or a cow to become a hamburger. These latter things are not instances of creation but rather of “change [mutatio],” which is the term Thomas uses to speak of giving new form to something that already exists. “Creation from nothing” does not mean that nothingness begins to be something, but that creation does not involve “Making X from Y” but simply “Making X to be.” In creation, something exists solely from its relatedness to God its source.
Fifth, the relation of radical dependence that constitutes creatures is uniquely a relationship to God. While creatures may cause various changes in other creatures, even to the point of making a new thing (as when a hamburger is newly made from a cow), only God makes things to be apart from any preexisting potential. At the same time, while creatures cannot cause things to be from nothing, they do possess a genuine causal efficacy. The nutrients in the grass really do cause the calf to become a cow and the agency of the butcher really does cause the cow to become hamburger. For Thomas, this causal efficacy of creatures in no way detracts from God’s power as the cause of existence; indeed, he thinks it is a testimony to God’s power that he bestows the dignity of “secondary causality” on creatures. As it is sometimes put, for Thomas, the relationship of God and creatures is “noncompetitive.” There is no zero-sum relationship between God’s creative activity and the creaturely activity of causing because they lie on different planes: God’s activity of creatio—making things exist—and the creature activity of mutatio—bringing about changes in things that exist. Those planes do sometimes intersect, as in the case of miracles, but these do not figure into Aquinas’s formal account of creation. Still, there is an intimate connection between the two planes in all cases, since the creaturely capacity for mutatio is a participation in divine creatio.
These remarks, brief though they are, will have to serve as an account of Thomas’s “formal” or grammatical account of creation, as we now turn to look at how the grammar of creation structures his account of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.
Transubstantiation on Trial
Even though the term “transubstantiation” predates Thomas Aquinas by at least a century and is used by him only occasionally in his mature theology, the doctrine of transubstantiation has often, rightly or wrongly (and I am inclined to think the latter), been taken to be his signal contribution of Catholic Eucharistic theology, employing Aristotle’s philosophy to explain Christ’s Eucharistic presence. Not everyone, of course, sees this contribution as a positive thing. Martin Luther opined that the church that had decreed the doctrine of transubstantiation was “the Thomistic—that is, the Aristotelian church.” He saw it as an explanation that misused Aristotle, who himself was a dubious authority on matters of faith, such that Thomas was to be pitied for “building an unfortunate superstructure upon an unfortunate foundation.” Luther’s objection gives voice to those who feel that Christ’s Eucharistic presence should be left mysterious and not subjected to the torturous rigors of Scholastic logic and the natural philosophy of Aristotle. Others have had an opposite, yet no less negative reaction, seeing transubstantiation as involving magical and irrational claims, as witnessed to by the term “hocus pocus,” which the seventeenth-century Anglican divine Bishop Tillotson suggested was “a corruption of Hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation, a doctrine he thought riddled with “monstrous absurdities.” Engendering seemingly contradictory charges of hyper-rationalism or magical irrationality, transubstantiation, and by extension Thomas, has been a principal piece of evidence in the case for the failings of medieval Catholic theology.
Of course, criticism of Medieval Scholastic approaches to the sacraments is not solely the purview of Protestant theologians. The Catholic theologian and priest Louis-Marie Chauvet has developed a particularly sweeping and influential critique of Scholastic accounts of sacramental causality, a critique that does not spare Thomas Aquinas. While appreciative of what Thomas was attempting to achieve and judging him superior to many other Scholastics, Chauvet nonetheless sees his sacramental theology, including his theology of the Eucharist, as part of a tradition that is ultimately a dead end. His criticism of Aquinas is two-fold. In broad terms, he includes Thomas in his rejection of the entire Scholastic tradition of speaking of sacraments as “causes,” which he sees as “metaphysical” and “onto-theological.” Second, he criticizes Aquinas’s Eucharistic theology more specifically for the rupture it creates between the sacramental and ecclesial bodies of Christ. Both of these criticisms are indebted to Heidegger, whom Chauvet takes as the bellwether of our current postmodern situation.
Chauvet begins his masterwork, Symbol and Sacrament, by asking why it is that the Scholastics would make “cause” (along with “sign”) a privileged category for understanding the sacraments. Why speak of sacraments as “causes of grace” when the term “cause” implies the production or augmentation of an object, and grace is “the paradigmatic case of something that is a non-object, a non-value”? His answer is, in brief, that “the Scholastics were unable to think otherwise; they were prevented from doing so by the onto-theological presuppositions which structured their entire culture.” Chauvet takes Aquinas to be the most sophisticated representative of this tradition—one who avoids many of the most egregious excesses of onto-theology, while in the end being unable to escape its clutches.
Chauvet appreciates the primacy that Aquinas gives in the Summa theologiae to the category of “sign” over cause: sacraments are signs that have causal efficacy. This represents a shift from the theology of his Sentences commentary, in which sacraments are causes that signify. Yet this “banishment” of causality is only temporary, for a few questions later (Summa theologiae 3.62), when Thomas inquires into the principal effect of the sacraments, which is grace, “causality returns in force” as Thomas develops his mature view that sacraments are neither mere “occasions” of grace, nor simply “disposing causes” making human beings apt to receive grace, but rather are true instrumental efficient causes of grace. And with this, Thomas falls into the pit of what Chauvet calls “the productionist scheme of representation” in which being takes priority over becoming and grace is thereby reified as a “thing” that is produced rather than a gift that is given. In the end, despite his valiant attempt to think sacraments as signs, Thomas cannot escape the onto-theological heritage in which being is “represented as the general and universal ‘something’ or ‘stuff’ that conceals itself beneath entities, which ‘lies at the base’ of each of them (hypokeimenon). A permanent ‘subsistent being,’ substratum, sub-jectum, and finally, as Descartes describes it, sub-stantia.”
Chauvet offers further criticisms of Aquinas’s Eucharistic theology in particular. Again, he offers an appreciation of the subtlety and sophistication of Thomas’s theological achievement and avoids simpleminded caricatures of transubstantiation. He recognizes that, by recourse to the language of “substance,” which is “neither a ‘this’ or a ‘that’ nor anything which can be attained by sensible cognition,” Thomas “exorcises every spatial representation of the Eucharistic presence.” Thus it is also “outside any physicalism and any more or less gross representation.” He further recognizes that transubstantiation is not reducible to Aristotelian metaphysics but, particularly in the claim that the accidents of bread and wine persist without inhering in a substance, calls for the “sacrificium intellectus” of faith.
Yet, as Chauvet sees it, a problem still remains in Aquinas’s view that in the Eucharist, “its first effect (res et sacramentum) is in ipsa materia (‘in the matter itself’).” Chauvet acknowledges that Thomas sees the “final purpose [res tantum]” of the Eucharist as the unity of the totus Christus—the Mystical Body, head and members—but believes that so long as the sacrament is seen as “perfected” in the consecration of the bread and wine, and not in the Eucharistic communion of the faithful, “the Church remains only the extrinsic end.” Thus, the culprit in all this, not surprisingly, is “the model of a metaphysical substance.” As Chauvet puts it,
In the perspective of the Aristotelian “substance” as the expression of the ultimate reality of entities, one could express the integrality and radicalness of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament only by putting between parentheses, at least during the analysis of the “how” of Eucharistic conversion, its relation to the Church. This is exactly what happens with Thomas: if he strongly emphasizes the connection of the Eucharist to the Church both before and after his analysis of transubstantiation, he puts it between parentheses during this analysis.
The language of “transubstantiation” implies that what the sacrament is really about is the production of the static “substance” of Christ’s Body and Blood, which might be eaten or adored by the Christian faithful but that in its self-enclosed sufficiency can bear only an extrinsic relationship to the ecclesial Body of Christ. Chauvet’s own view is that “the great sacramentum of Christ’s presence is not the bread as such in its unbroken state. Or rather, it is indeed the bread, but in its very essence, bread-as-food, bread-as-meal, bread-for-sharing.” The presence of Christ is better described not as a substance that has been produced but as a gift that has been given.
Chauvet’s critique is both subtle and sympathetic (the same cannot really be said of Frater Luther’s or Bishop Tillotson’s), yet to my mind, it is also quite wrong. To appreciate its wrongness, we need to attend to how the grammar of creation structures what Thomas says about Eucharistic presence. Fortunately, Thomas does this for us explicitly in his Summa theologiae, and I will proceed by looking in some detail at his discussion.
Making Christ’s Body
Thomas concludes question seventy-five of the Third Part of the Summa with an article that begins, videtur quod haec sit falsa: “Ex pane fit corpus Christi [It seems that this is false: “The body of Christ is made from bread”]. The statement under scrutiny, of which Thomas will affirm the truth, would seem to be a prime example of what Chauvet calls the “productionist mentality” with regard to the sacraments. Before going on to examine whether or not this is the case, we should first appreciate the form of the question. It is in some ways reminiscent of the approach taken in question sixteen of the Third Part of the Summa, in which Thomas inquires into such statements as “God is a human being” and “God was made a human being” and “Christ is a creature.” In other words, Thomas proposes a particular piece of human speech and asks whether it can be affirmed as true. The question, then, is whether “The body of Christ is made from bread” is a well-formed sentence for speaking about the Eucharist and, if it is, what does it tell us about the formal or constitutive features of Christ’s Eucharistic presence.
The four objections Thomas gives to the statement “The body of Christ is made from bread” lay out the basic issue at stake in this article: How is the Eucharistic conversion of bread into the Body of Christ located conceptually in relation to other ways in which particular substances come to be where they were not before—i.e., natural change and the divine act of creation? Put differently, in what ways do well-formed sentences about natural change provide a paradigm for well-formed sentences concerning Christ’s Eucharistic presence, and in what ways do well-formed sentences about creation provide such a paradigm?
Objections 1, 2, and 4 see “The body of Christ is made from bread” as implying that Christ’s Eucharistic presence involves some sort of change along the lines of the changes that we encounter in nature, such that Eucharistic conversion is equivalent to a subject undergoing a change, whether this be a substance taking on an accident or a material substratum receiving a new substantial form. Each of these objections points to the absurdity of such an account of Eucharistic presence by showing the unacceptable further statements it would seem to authorize. Objection 1 reads “The body of Christ is made from bread” as treating “bread” like a subject that receives a new substantial or accidental form, authorizing us to say “Bread is made the body of Christ” in the same way that we might say “The calf becomes a cow” or “The cow becomes hamburger.” Objection 2 sees it as treating the bread as the “stuff” from which Christ’s Body is made, authorizing us to say, “The bread is the body of Christ” in the same way that we might say, “The cow flesh is hamburger.” Objection 4 sees it as implying that there is a passive potential in bread to be Christ’s Body, authorizing us to say, “Bread can be the body of Christ,” in the same way as we might say, “A cow can be hamburger.”
The third objection takes a slightly different tack: in the expression “The body of Christ is made from bread,” the preposition “from [ex]” implies a conversion of one thing into another, and not simply the sort of conversion involved in natural change, but the radical conversion of one whole substance into another whole substance. It is analogous to an individual cow becoming, not hamburger, but a different individual cow (Flossie becoming Bossie), in which the form “cow” is instantiated in different matter. This would seem to imply, the third objection goes on to state, that the Eucharistic conversion is “more miraculous” than God’s act of creation, which we do not conceive of as a conversion of one entire thing into another entire thing but rather as a production presupposing nothing. What is unstated in the objection, but made clear in Thomas’s reply (ad 3), is that such a conversion of one entire substance into another is more miraculous than creation because, as unimaginable as creation might be, it still conforms to the notion of causal production.
Thus, the objections pose the difficulties with the proposition “The body of Christ is made out of bread.” Objections 1, 2, and 4 see it as assimilating Eucharistic conversion to natural change; objection 3 argues that if it is not interpreted as implying natural change, then it implies a sort of divine activity exceeding the miracle of creation from nothing, which presumably cannot be exceeded since it is presupposed by all other miraculous activity. The sed contra, posing the difficulty with the position taken in the objections, notes that no less an authority than Ambrose had written, Ubi accedit consecratio, de pane fit corpus Christi (“When the consecration takes place, the body of Christ is made of bread”). The question is, has Ambrose simply uttered an ill-formed sentence? If not, if we judge his sentence to be well-formed, what does this tell us about Eucharistic conversion?
As so often when confronted with a traditional formulation that seems in conflict with an established doctrinal position, Thomas seeks to make key distinctions in order to save the traditional formulation. He recognizes that what we might call the “primary speech” of the Church—in this case, the mystagogical preaching of Ambrose, but also the language of Scripture and liturgy—does not always neatly conform to doctrinal rules, and that part of the task of sacra doctrina is to show how these primary utterances of faith can intelligibly fit together within the doctrinal grammar of the Church. Thus, he begins by saying that the “conversion of bread into the body of Christ in some respect fits [convenit] both with creation and with natural change, and in some respects differs from both.” This raises the question of the ways in which language akin to the language that we use to speak of natural change is a fitting way of signifying what takes place when bread and wine become Christ’s Body and Blood, and in what ways such language is unfitting. Likewise, how is language akin to the language that we use in speaking of God’s production of creatures from nothing a fitting way of signifying what takes place when bread and wine become Christ’s Body and Blood, and how is such language unfitting? We might say that Aquinas is inquiring as to which grammar—the grammar of natural change or the grammar of creation—we ought to look to find our paradigm of a well-formed sentence regarding Eucharistic conversion.
Aquinas first notes that, in all three cases, our well-formed sentences have an “order of terms.” Thomas means by this that our statements about creation, natural change, and transubstantiation all present two terms in such a way that one follows the other, and they do not present the two terms as existing simultaneously. Thus, we have nonexistence followed by creation, cow followed by hamburger, and bread followed by Christ’s Body. In this way, whether we take natural change or creation as our paradigm for a well-formed sentence concerning the Eucharist, the statement “The body of Christ is made from bread” would seem to be a well-formed sentence. But while the linguistic ordering of the terms might be the same in both creation and in natural change, what it means for one thing to follow the other is quite different in the two cases. Which is to be preferred in speaking of the Eucharist?
Thomas notes that well-formed sentences about creation offer a uniquely fitting paradigm for speaking about the Eucharist inasmuch as in neither case ought we to speak as if there were a subject underlying the terms of the statement. In the case of creation, it is clearly nonsensical to speak of there being a subject possessing the form of nonexistence that then undergoes a change such that it acquires the form of existence. Likewise, we ought not understand any statement regarding Eucharistic conversion (such as “The body of Christ is made from bread”) as implying that there is a subject possessing the form of bread that undergoes a change such that it acquires the form of the Body of Christ. In this way, Eucharistic conversion conforms to the paradigm of creation: it is not mutatio, the kind of coming to be that we are familiar with from nature, in which a potential is realized in some subject; it is, rather, the beginning to be of an entire substance, matter and form, potential and actuality. It is, as we have seen, the divine gift of esse. If in this regard our statements about the Eucharist conform to the paradigm of natural change rather than to the paradigm of creation, they will be ill-formed, “unfitting” sentences.
But then Thomas goes on to say that there are two ways in which well-formed sentences about natural change do offer a fitting paradigm for speaking about the Eucharist. First, well-formed sentences in both cases will make clear that one term of the sentence “passes into” [transit] the other: just as we have a cow that becomes hamburger, so too we have bread that becomes the body of Christ. As Stephen Brock has pointed out, one thing “passing into” another is a passage “from what is distinctive about one term to what is distinctive about another.” In creation, there is nothing “distinctive” about nonbeing, and thus there can be no passage from nonbeing to what is “distinctive” about being. Natural change and transubstantiation, on the other hand, are just such passages. Despite the radical difference in the two cases of what it means for one term to “pass into” the other—in the case of natural change involving the reception of successive forms by a subject (the flesh ceasing to be a cow and becoming hamburger) and in the case of Eucharistic conversion involving one entire substance beginning to be another (as if Flossie were to become Bossie)—both involve one distinct thing followed by another distinct thing, something clearly not the case in creation. Second, Thomas notes that in both natural change and transubstantiation there is “something that remains the same”: in the case of natural change, this is the matter or subject that undergoes the change; in transubstantiation, this is the empirical reality (i.e., “accidents”) of the bread and wine. This second similarity between natural change and Eucharistic conversion will, as we shall see, account for the possibility of misunderstanding certain statements contained within the primary speech of the Church.
Thomas then draws linguistic conclusions from this mapping of Eucharistic conversion in relation to natural change and creation. In all three cases, well-formed sentences cannot employ the present tense copula est to relate their terms—one cannot say that nonbeing is being, or that a cow is a hamburger, or that bread is the Body of Christ—but, because of the order of terms, one can employ the preposition ex to relate their terms—creation is properly spoken of as ex nihilo, hamburger comes ex vacca, and the body of Christ is ex pane. As Thomas explains in the reply to objection 1, the preposition “from [ex]” is used in sentences concerning creation and Eucharistic conversion in the same way that one says, “Out of morning comes day.” There is no thing that is first morning and then becomes day. Thus, it would seem that “from” is used analogously in statements about natural change, on the one hand, and creation and Eucharistic conversion, on the other.
In the cases of natural change and transubstantiation, but not in the case of creation, one can employ the verb conversionis, since this implies the transitus of one subject “passing into” another, of one distinctiveness ending and another distinctiveness beginning from it. Yet the crucial difference between every natural change and the Eucharistic conversion is that in natural change, distinctiveness is a question of one form passing into another form, while in Eucharistic conversion, we have one entire substance passing into another entire substance, and this difference marks Eucharistic conversion with its own proper name: “transubstantiation.”
The absence in transubstantiation of any perduring subject that undergoes the change leads to further linguistic consequences. We cannot speak of the bread having the potential to be the Body of Christ because something’s potential to be something else depends upon the capacity of the perduring subject or matter to take on new forms. While we might say that “a cow can be hamburger” or “the flesh of the hamburger is made of the flesh of the cow,” since there is a common substrate of flesh in both the cow and the hamburger, we ought not to say that “bread can be [possit esse] the Body of Christ” nor that “the Body of Christ is made of [de] bread,” just as, in the case of creation, we ought not to say that “nonbeing can be being” or “being is made of non-being.” In the cases of both creation and transubstantiation, the first term of the statement does not possess any potentiality to become the second term. Likewise, while we might say that “a cow will be a hamburger” or “a cow becomes a hamburger,” we ought not to say that “bread will be [erit] the Body of Christ” or that “bread becomes [fiat] the Body of Christ,” any more than we would say that “nonbeing will be being” or “nonbeing becomes being.” While Eucharistic conversion is, like natural change, a transitus, it is so in a highly qualified sense—a sense that is qualified by its conformity to the grammar of creation as the coming to be of the whole substance.
Up to this point, Thomas seems to have offered us a fairly clear set of linguistic rules, a tight grammar of Eucharistic speech. In statements in which the first term is “bread” and the second term is “the Body of Christ,” we ought not to connect them by means of a word that implies their concurrent identity (such as “is [est]”), nor a word that posits a perduring subject with the potential both to be bread and to be the Body of Christ (such as “can be [potest]” or “is made of [de]” or “becomes [fit]” or “will be [erit]”). Words that we can use to join the two terms are those, such as ex, that signify only the order of terms, as well as those, such as conversionis, that signify one substance “passing into” another.
So far, so good. But then it all seems to fall apart, or at least the ligaments of the grammar loosen as it collides with the colloquialism of the primary speech of the Church. Thomas is forced to acknowledge that this primary speech sometimes does not conform to his criteria for well-formed sentences expressing the Eucharistic conversion. The example from Ambrose provided in the sed contra is a case in point: Ubi accedit consecratio, de pane fit corpus Christi. Here, we find both the preposition de and the verb fit, which Aquinas had earlier said implied a perduring subject.
Thomas’s way of accommodating these instances of primary Christian speech is to say that they may be allowed if understood in a certain sense (secundum quandam similitudinem); that is, they are allowable if the first term of the sentence, “bread,” is taken to signify not the substance bread, but rather “that which is contained under the appearance of bread [hoc quod sub speciebus panis continetur].” In other words, in some statements, our use of the term “bread” is a kind of “pointing” that indicates the bread’s dimensive quantity and the accidents inhering in it, which normally mediate the presence of the substance of bread but after the consecration mediate the presence of the substance of Christ’s Body. In this way, Ambrose ought to be understood as saying that when the consecration happens, that which appears under the appearance of bread ceases to be bread and begins to be the Body of Christ. We might say that the colloquial, primary speech of the Church quite naturally uses “bread” and “wine” as indeterminate “pointers” that can draw our attention first to the natural substances of bread and wine, and then to the Body and Blood of Christ. Glossed in this way, not only the sentence posed in the original question, ex pane fit corpus Christi, but also Ambrose’s sentence, de pane fit corpus Christi, can be understood as well-formed sentences.
Transubstantiation in the Space Between Creation and Change
What might we draw from this somewhat torturously close analysis of an article from the Summa theologiae? In displaying this careful dissection of a single piece of Eucharistic language and suggesting that in the end even a statement like Ambrose’s can be made to fit the parameters of doctrinal grammar, have I perhaps simply confirmed suspicions that transubstantiation hovers somewhere between a hyper-rational dissection of a mystery and sheer nonsensical magical assertion, that it is a conjuring trick with language that conveys a sense of logical rigor but can in fact accommodate almost anything? Moreover, does Thomas’s justification of the language of “making” Christ’s Body justify Chauvet’s suspicion that he, too, falls prey to a “productionist” account of sacramental causality? I hope to show that neither of these things is the case.
Perhaps what is most clear from the analysis that he offers in Summa theologiae 3.75.8 is that Thomas seeks to locate Eucharistic conversion in the logical space between natural change and creation by employing a kind of hybrid grammar, a creole. Sometimes statements about natural change provide a paradigm for well-formed sentences concerning Christ’s Eucharistic presence, and sometimes statements about creation provide the appropriate paradigm. We might say that the proper conceptual location for Eucharistic conversion is an interstitial one, and this location is appropriately marked by the word “transubstantiation.” Why is this an appropriate location, and why is “transubstantiation” an appropriate marker for this location?
As to conceptual location: first, Eucharistic conversion is fittingly spoken of in the way that we speak of creation because both involve the production of an entire substance and not simply the educing of a new form in matter. Of course, in speaking of substance, we are also speaking of being [esse], which is the proper act of a substance. Thus Thomas writes in his commentary on First Corinthians, “The consecration does not occur by the consecrated matter merely receiving some spiritual power, but by the fact that it is transubstantiated according to its esse into the body of Christ.” What is ultimately at stake in speaking of the conversion of substance is precisely this claim that what we encounter in the Eucharist is the esse substantiale or, better, the esse personale of Christ. As Colman O’Neill emphasized, what is at stake in recognizing the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not the recognition of a kind of thing but of a unique person. He writes that if we “leave aside all but the most primitive of concepts and . . . concentrate on the utter purity of existential judgement which expresses our first, uncomplicated recognition of the other as other—perhaps when we say: ‘Why, it is you’—then the authentic meaning of ‘substance’ is given because it has been instinctively recognized simply in recognition of the other.” Because what becomes present to us in the Eucharist is the act of existing that is the personal being of Jesus Christ, the Eucharistic conversion is spoken of in ways that conform to the production of substances ex nihilo, the beginning to be of actus essendi that we call “creation.” Indeed, while Aquinas locates transubstantiation between creation and natural change, the balance tilts rather decidedly toward creation and, therefore, the gift of esse.
And yet, Eucharistic conversion is also fittingly spoken of in the way that we speak of natural change. This is because Eucharistic conversion, like natural change, is an event that occurs in our world against the background of creation, whereas creation is not a change in our world but rather the reason why we have a world at all. By virtue of the Resurrection and Ascension, Christ’s body shares in God’s own transcendence and impassibility, and any fitting account of his Eucharistic presence must take account of this. That is to say, Eucharistic conversion must be a change that occurs in this world, or it is no change at all. Stephen Brock notes, “This is the decisive point for Thomas: the body of Christ cannot begin to exist in the sacrament by any change in the body itself (ST III, q. 75, a. 2). It must do so by a change undergone by something else.” The paradigm of natural change serves to point up the this-worldly character of the change that is transubstantiation. The tenseless grammar of creation is inadequate for indicating that there is a true process of becoming, a real transitus, involved: Christ becomes our food, not by becoming bread and wine, but by the this-worldly reality of bread and wine becoming Christ.
Thus, the balance tilts toward the language of creation, but not completely. And this is why Thomas says that Eucharistic conversion has “its own name,” which is transubstantiation. Neither creation nor natural change can in the end furnish us with the paradigm for well-formed sentences about Christ’s Eucharistic presence. The uniqueness of the term “transubstantiation” is its combination of the transitus that we know from the immanent natural process of one substantial form “passing into” another with the transcendent beginning to be of substances that we call “creation.”
Is it, then, the case that transubstantiation tends, as Chauvet claims, to a conceiving of the Eucharist as a process of production in which Christ’s body becomes an object that is available in a fashion that is, as it were, indifferent to its reception by the faithful? Chauvet assumes that the language of efficient causality must imply the soulless production of inert objects, but this is not the case. Wouldn’t we rather say that in creation ex nihilo God produces the world, yet not as an inert object but as the gift of existence? Bernhard Blankenhorn has suggested that Aquinas’s language of sacraments as instrumental efficient causes derives not from the onto-theological tradition but from the scriptural image of Wisdom as God’s “artisan” (Wisdom 7:32) through whom God creates the world out of love. As he notes, “Precisely when Scripture most explicitly connects the language of the Creator God to the notion of artistic production do we find the clearest teaching that creation is an act of divine love.” Likewise in the Eucharist. Located between creation from nothing and artisanal making, the language of transubstantiation seems almost designed to lead us away from a “productionist” model. Like creation, it is not a process of production because it is not a natural process at all but simply a supernatural gift. Yet, like natural change, it is a transformation that occurs in our world because it occurs for our sake. Christ is not present indifferently but personally, for us and for our salvation.
In Thomas, the term “transubstantiation” is the fruit of the modest, but ferociously difficult, endeavor to understand the primary speech of the Church about the Eucharistic mystery. It does not name a theory of Eucharistic conversion; it does not give us a list of ingredients (substance, accidents, dimensive quantity, etc.) nor describe the process of transformation by which Christ becomes present. Nor is it simply a fideistic affirmation of the magical presence of Christ behind the shadows of bread and wine. Rather, it gives us some glimpse of the Eucharistic mystery by locating the event of Christ’s presence in an interstitial location, not between rationalism and magic, but between the grammars of creation and natural change. In response to the third objection in Summa theologiae 3.75.8, Aquinas grants the objector’s point: speaking of the Eucharistic conversion of one entire substance into another entire substance does imply something more miraculous than creation. He simply does not think that this makes transubstantiation false; rather, it situates it in a space of supreme wonder. Transubstantiation is more miraculous than creation, not because it requires more divine productive power, but because it shows forth more clearly the nature of that divine power by using the grammar of creation to speak of God’s drawing near in redemption. For while creation might be ascribed to a deity who acts at a distance, the Eucharist shows forth a divine power that is transcendent precisely in being present to us as our pilgrim food.
EDITORIAL STATEMENT: This article is excerpted from Thinking Through Aquinas (Word on Fire Academic, forthcoming).
