"Physical" Real Preesense

[Tired]

Well, the substance truly IS his body and blood (and soul and divinity). If you look at it under a microscope, or touch it ans feel it, erc., it will look and feel like bread. But that's no longer what its substance is.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Perhaps the question is what VeryTas means by physical. What do you mean?

[VeryTas]

Perhaps the question is what VeryTas means by physical. What do you mean?

Well, I don't know that there is any authority for a good definition. My assumption is that physical refers to created things, whether we can sense them or not, but does not refer to purely spiritual things like angels and God. But if a purely spiritual thing can join a created nature to itself, as with the incarnation, then it can be physically present to us along with its spiritual presence. The sensible accidents of the Eucharist (the appearances of bread and wine) are non-spiritual created things (energy at least) but their physical presence in the Eucharist, though visible, is not the physical presence of Christ, which is grasped by faith. Then are those accidents symbolic of the body (/blood/soul/divinity) of Christ which is actually there? I guess so. Maybe I'm saying something similar to Thomas. Because the Eucharist is so unique, I think there can be more than one good way of speaking of it by which we end up mystified, in a good way.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

I thought it might be a matter of definitions, as such discussions tend to be. Theologians don't use the word "physical" because it implies mass and extension in space, neither of which is applicable to the way in which Christ is present in the consecrated elements. For example, at Benediction, the resurrected Body of Christ, which is in Heaven, does not move even though the Host does in the blessing.

[gherkin]

Perhaps the question is what VeryTas means by physical. What do you mean?

Well, I don't know that there is any authority for a good definition. My assumption is that physical refers to created things, whether we can sense them or not, but does not refer to purely spiritual things like angels and God. But if a purely spiritual thing can join a created nature to itself, as with the incarnation, then it can be physically present to us along with its spiritual presence. The sensible accidents of the Eucharist (the appearances of bread and wine) are non-spiritual created things (energy at least) but their physical presence in the Eucharist, though visible, is not the physical presence of Christ, which is grasped by faith. Then are those accidents symbolic of the body (/blood/soul/divinity) of Christ which is actually there? I guess so. Maybe I'm saying something similar to Thomas. Because the Eucharist is so unique, I think there can be more than one good way of speaking of it by which we end up mystified, in a good way.

The angels are also creatures. What you say above appears to imply that they are not.

The Eucharist is clearly a mystery that can't be exhaustively explained theologically. Of course, that's true even of non-mysterious things. St. Thomas famously wrote that no philosopher has ever perfectly understood the nature of a single fly. (Emphasis on perfectly, which doesn't imply error as much as ignorance.) We can go only so far in what we grasp, and when it comes to something like the Eucharist, our limitations become manifest. However, the Church is very clear in her teaching on this mystery, and consistently and firmly uses the language of substance and accident.

In the last century and change, various modernist theologians have tried to suggest that this 'aristotelian' language is dispensable, and that there are better, less metaphysically loaded, ways to explain the mystery. It is true that there are other ways to try to explain the mystery; it is gravely false to think that we can or should try to do without the Church's clear and emphatic teaching on this matter. It would be exactly the same kind of error as suggesting that we jettison the language of person and nature when we describe the Blessed Trinity. These, too, are heavily loaded philosophical terms. Maybe there are other ways to try to think about the Trinity (all of them inadequate), but the benchmark is and must be what God has actually taught us through his Church. It's not that the traditional teaching on Transubstantiation is some kind of Thomistic straitjacket on the mystery. Rather, it's that the Church has decisively shown that the best way we have available to us to grasp what's graspable about this mystery is through language and concepts found in St. Thomas.

One problem for most of us is that this teaching does indeed require some significant study to begin to really grasp. Philosophical language isn't necessarily tied to ordinary uses. What we mean in English by substance is not what St. Thomas meant, or what the Church means. Rising almost to the level of necessary reading on this matter, for those who want to get a layman's grip on the matter, is Abbot Vonier's Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist.

[VeryTas]

Gherkin, I did misspeak implying that angels were not creatures. You stated very well the difficulty of the traditional language but also its value. So I agree. I'll let the physicality of the Eucharist go since it is hard to be clear on what physical means. I still think it is quite proper to call his presence bodily (though that retains the mind boggle) because he pretty much instituted it with the word "body". (A new topic/thread could be Why is the sacrifice of the Mass "unbloody", seeing it produces his blood; true, it is an unmessy sacrifice.)

[Stella]

Pope StJPII encouraged studying phenomenological ways of understanding the corporeality of Jesus Real Presence in the Eucharist. He described phenomenology in his address to a delegation of the world Institute of Phenomenology of Hanover.

Phenomenology is primarily a style of thought, a relationship of the mind with reality whose essential and constitutive features it aims to grasp, avoiding prejudice and schematisms. I mean that it is, as it were, an attitude of intellectual charity to the human being and the world, and for the believer, to God, the beginning and end of all things. To overcome the crisis of meaning which is characteristic of some sectors of modern thought, I insisted, in the Encyclical Fides et Ratio (cf. n. 83), on an openness to metaphysics, and phenomenology can make a significant contribution to this openness.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-pau ... nover.html

[Doom]

Gherkin, I did misspeak implying that angels were not creatures. You stated very well the difficulty of the traditional language but also its value. So I agree. I'll let the physicality of the Eucharist go since it is hard to be clear on what physical means. I still think it is quite proper to call his presence bodily (though that retains the mind boggle) because he pretty much instituted it with the word "body". (A new topic/thread could be Why is the sacrifice of the Mass "unbloody", seeing it produces his blood; true, it is an unmessy sacrifice.)

The words the Church uses are "really, truly and substantively" and "sacramentally'