A friend is asking me whether I think the RCC is right in believing that the communion elements literally become the body and blood of Jesus, and whether taking communion might have some sort of power for sanctification of our bodies. He’s been reading the early fathers and says they seem to think this way – about the transubstantiation, I mean. What do you all think? Has anyone researched this?
Thanks for any help you can give me!
Blessings, Cindy
Nifty thread title, btw. 
The early fathers definitely seem to go with tran- or consubstantiation – the technical distinction isn’t made until much later.
Both positions involve the notion that the elements become the spiritual flesh and blood of Christ, and so involve the real presence and immediate manifestation of Christ personally. Thus adherents directly worship Christ in physically local presence (if they’re correct) by worshiping the elements.
Conssubstantiation means the elements continue to be bread and wine physically while also becoming the spiritual flesh and blood.
Transsubstantiation means that the elements cease to be bread and wine at all, although to every natural observation they continue to hold the forms of bread and wine; this requires a somewhat greater discernment of the truth of the matter by faith.
On one hand transsubstantiation smacks of docetism, but on the other it avoids some problems of multiple Incarnations in bread and wine (not even human flesh and blood): the real presence isn’t a new Incarnation but a manifestation of a previously achieved Incarnation. It makes (somewhat) more sense for Christ to replace the physical elements of bread and wine while retaining their form (which can thus be processed by the physical body), than for Christ to manifest spiritual flesh and blood in actual physical elements which are not at all human flesh and blood.
(I think that properly synopsizes the theological debates among proponents either way.)
I don’t recall ever seeing any strong theological rationale for either doctrine; but the rationale has always been one of tradition descending from the first apostles and scriptural testimony. The first is about as solid as any other tradition of descent (whatever that may be worth); the second is, I must admit, rather more solid than I was expecting when I dug around last year.
To be specific, I was more than a little impressed by Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. I’ve read numerous Catholic apologetics, and this is by far the most concisely dense case for the Real Presence (one way or another) I’ve found. I could only find a couple of places where I thought he stretched too far, and even completely discounting those places (much moreso reckoning them more moderately) didn’t hurt his overall case.
I never had any particular animosity toward the notion of the Real Presence; after reading that book, I’m pretty far along in believing that we should expect it to happen.
(No doubt my belief that not-God reality is created through the ongoing sacrifice of the Son in a kind of death, helps a lot in building a bridge toward accepting the occasional special manifestation of Christ in elements that wouldn’t normally be regarded as personal vehicles. 
)
Thanks, Jason
Maybe I’ll have to have a look at that book – but I’ve already bought yet one more book today. 
I didn’t quite understand what you meant by this bit:
Would you explain a bit further?
The Kindle version is less than a lunch, for what it’s worth. 
(That’s how I got it.)
Yeah, the other thing is rather complicated. You’re reading Sword to the Heart, right? Just keep going; I arrive at that position somewhere in Section Three, and discuss it with some frequency from there on out.
An overly quick summary is that God Self-begotten, the living action of God in continual and fundamental self-existence, constantly chooses to remain in loyal communion with God Self-begetting rather than trying to insist on going “His own way”.
This submission of the Son (analogically speaking) is the highest and holiest and most proper self-sacrifice, the highest and most proper death, and is fundamental to God’s own eonian life. It’s also the living ground of positive justice, “fair-togetherness”, and why God can be correctly spoken of as being essentially love.
If God Self-begetting and Self-begotten decide to give One Another something other than Themselves, the first thing They would give is the gift of another Person of God, and so we have God proceeding, a Third Person neither begetting nor begotten, thus personally distinct from the First and Second Persons of the singular divine unity, but Who can also be spoken of as the Spirit of the Father and also as the Spirit of the Son. (The Spirit meanwhile gives the Son to the Father and vice versa. This is not strictly necessary in the divine economy–the other Persons are entirely capable of giving Themselves to each other already–but becomes a necessary factor later in communion with creatures.)
Once God fully God is giving the gift of God fully God to God fully God–which would happen eternally at God’s own level of self-existence–there wouldn’t be any point, so far as I currently can see, to a fourth distinct Person of God being generated by the other three Persons. So if the Persons decide to give something else to each other, that could only be something not-God.
There isn’t any other not-God reality “next door” to Fundamental Reality Himself, however; and even if there was, It (or He) would be impervious to God’s action regarding It. (If the other Fundamental Reality was also Personal, thus another God Most High, this other substantially separate Independent Fact could choose to be affected by God and vice versa; but then both proposed IFs would be sharing a common overarching existence with one another which means they would not actually be Independent Facts themselves and we’d have to be looking farther back for the real ultimate God or fundamental reality. This is not an ontological problem for multiple persons of one and only one Independent Fact however.)
Nor is there any void of reality “next door” for God to create not-God realities into.
Not-God realities must be created by God within and from God. (In Him we live and move and have our being and by Him we continue to hold together.)
But that means the action of God must choose to submit to a categorically different kind of self-sacrifice, still one of love (especially for the other Persons of God), and still similar in theme to the self-sacrifice by which God continues coherently existing as God, but a self-sacrifice in a different ‘direction’ (so to speak).
The 2nd Person as the living action of God thus ceases action partially, creating a “partiality” by doing so, insofar as it is possible for God to do so. This creates (not “begets”) a field of not-God reality, which God is yet actively connected to at all points of its reality and which God acts (omnipresently and so also omnisciently) to keep in existence with its properties.
But this not-God Nature, not being God, has to be allowed by God to behave in not-God ways; so even though God can introduce distinctly new effects at any point through His continual self-sacrificial upkeep of this Nature, usually He’ll let Nature, and any entities developed within this Nature (with or without His direct contributions, the Sky-Father sometimes engendering children in Mother Nature so to speak), make their own contributions to the natural history. That’s just as true about the impersonal natural system as for persons God brings to life within the natural system: they aren’t God, they’re only created by God, through God’s various levels of self-sacrificial love. And so the persons will also be personally distinct as well as ontologically distinct from God.
With one potential exception: if God chooses to Incarnate in this system of Nature (not merely to manifest, although He can do that, too, at any time and place as He chooses). But such an Incarnation (and for that matter any mere manifestation) will be of the 2nd Person, the Logos, the foundational living self-sacrificial action of God, not one or more of the other Persons, even though in their own ways the 1st and 3rd Persons would also be cooperating with the Incarnation (or mere manifestation). It is the Son Who is sacrificed, not only temporally from, but ontologically as the foundation of the cosmos; when God acts personally in the cosmos, the Person of the Son is how God does so. (Yet still with communion, and thus with occasional recognition, by the Son toward the other Persons of God: the only-begotten God can be seen and heard and is not personally the invisible Father, etc.)
That’s… the, um, overly short version. There’s a lot more to it, including how this fits together with ethics, and sin, and the Passion and Resurrection. 
Sorry.
But that’s why I don’t really have a problem with the Real Presence in the bread and wine, metaphysically, despite some difficulty in figuring out which technical mode of the Presence makes the most sense there. It connects directly to the Son’s fundamental self-sacrifice in communal loyalty to and with the Father; connects directly to the sharing of God’s own eonian life, and the giving (and receiving) of the gift of God; connects directly to the self-sacrificial omnipresence of God upon which natural elements continually depend for any existence at all.
If anything, I would expect God to enact such a miracle for the faithful in any food and drink we eat, as part of our most intimate communion with God. In that sense, the remembrance in the bread and wine/juice, really is “only” symbolic of the giving of the life of the Son for our sakes: God can (and I expect does, or at least will someday) do it by any method of food and drink, or even by our ingestion of air, but historically it represents a specific action by the Son in several ways–a specific action that is itself emblematic of what the Son is always doing for all creation, and for all created persons, everywhere!
Notice how that fits thematically with universal salvation from sin, too: the fact any sinner continues to exist by God’s grace at all is strong evidence of God’s intention to persist for all sinners until all are saved from our sins.
Any lesser result, whether ECT or annihilation, would be tantamount to God Himself regarding the sacrifice of Christ as being void!–because it is by the loving sacrifice of the Son (first and foremost for the sake of the Father and the Spirit, but also for the sake of whoever and whatever is thereby created) that any of us exist at all; and it is by the loving sacrifice of the Son that any of us exist to make even rebellious contributions to history; and it is by the loving sacrifice of the Son that any of us continue to exist after doing any rebellion!
Transsubstantiation or consubstantiation would be themselves thus even stronger indications of the intentions of God to persist in saving all sinners from sin.
(I haven’t read Gregory Nyssus on this yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he and other catholic universalists taught basically the same thing. )
Thanks, Jason
I think I understood some of that. 
I am understanding STTH, but it’s hard work for me. I’m not used to thinking in quite that way, but I’m sure it’s good for me to learn. I’ve been reading “Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes” mostly as of late. And I have many more waiting in the que – which is my reason for not having clicked immediately on the book you suggested above. Although I’m sure I’ll eventually succumb. I’m not a fast reader; especially things like your STTH. Even with fiction, if it’s worth reading (to me) I’m so tempted to just dally along, savoring the words.
I do the same thing walking. If I want any exercise I have to use the elliptical because otherwise I spend too much time looking at rocks & etc. I’ve taken speed reading courses and I’m capable of reading fast and comprehending. I just can’t seem to make myself do it. 
Anyway, I’m planning to get back to STTH as soon as I finish the one I’m reading now – even though I HAVE bought his more in-depth book on the parables in Luke. (Yesterday) I think your logic or philosophy or whatever it is, is amazing. It’s a beautiful thing that I want to comprehend, but I can’t quite get the hang of it yet. I’ll probably have to read it again. I have this sense of having understood, while yet not being able to repeat it.
Blessings, Cindy
Yeah, rushing SttH, not a good idea. No worries.
I’m a big fan of Bailey’s Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. Somehow have never gotten around to reading his other works.
Jason, a question and a comment – I’ve been meaning to ask; what did you mean when you commented that procrastination was akin to gluttony? I think I know, but wanted to ask you for sure.
Comment – I grew up in central FL and I remember a news story from my early teens that horrified me. A lady was driving around Lake Hamilton and ran her car off into the lake. When they pulled her out she had a bullet in her head. Investigators decided that a guy who was testing out a new gun by firing it into the lake was the cause. I don’t know how they found out – whether he heard about it and came in or someone reported him or what, but the slug was from his gun. It had ricocheted off the lake’s surface.
One other thing your story brought to mind; my mom was always our girl scout troop leader, and one weekend we were camping in some hummock or other and one of the girls felt a sting in her leg. On examination we realized she had a wound in her calf. It was a bullet – though it didn’t do a lot of damage, considering. It had probably been shot from a mile or more away according to the docs, but can you imagine? Someone out in the woods goofing around and that’s where one of the bullets ended up. We didn’t even hear it.
Just thought you might find that interesting. Amazing things do happen.
I’ve forgotten what example I originally had in mind about the rifle-deflection off a lake; I think I had read an account of such a thing happening to a Girl Scout, but I’m not very sure (having slept since 2000. ) I do seem to recall changing it to someone being killed while driving a car, however, so that I wouldn’t be using the actual tragedy as an example.
Opps! 
I guess that happened to someone, too! It’s hard to out-imagine reality when it comes to tragedy. 
As to gluttony and procrastination: I’m usually procrastinating in order to do keep doing something else I want to do (certainly that was the example in the book), and that over-consumption would involve being gluttonous in principle.
Supporting a desire to do it in an improper way would, on the other hand, be lust, even though the topic isn’t sexual. Lust and gluttony tend to go together, but they aren’t exactly identical: I could be quite restrained about doing something in an improper way, or I could be gluttonous about doing something in an otherwise proper way.
On the other hand, since gluttony is itself an improper way of doing things, all gluttony may involve some lust as well: I lust to go do this, or to continue to do that, when I ought to stop now and go be doing the other instead.
(Sins tend to collapse into each other eventually anyway. 
I talk later in SecFour about what sin must basically involve, which as classically agreed must always be pride.)
I can’t say I know much at all about transubstantiation, but it just strikes me as wrong on various levels. Firstly, couldn’t you just put the wine under a microscope and see if it really had changed? Secondly, wouldn’t drinking literal blood and eating literal human flesh be ethically suspect - no to mention potentially damaging to ones health? And wouldn’t this mean you couldn’t be a Christian vegetarian? Thirdly, wouldn’t Jesus lose parts of his body as people kept eating it?
I know my issues are very unsophisticated, but I just can’t make head or tail of a belief that literally supposes that God wants us to eat human flesh???
That was already a well-known objection in ancient times. It’s tantamount to objecting that we could put Jesus under the microscope and see whether or not He was also fully God.
The distinction between tran- and con- substantiation does involve objections from consubstantialists that transsubstantiation results in a totally illusionary form that cannot be distinguished in any natural way from the bread and wine still existing as bread and wine. The demonstrable bread-and-wineity (so to speak) of the elements is held to be evidence for them remaining bread and wine as well as the spiritual substance of the flesh and blood of Christ. Thus con-substantiation, two substances with each other, like the two natures of Christ.
It’s literally spiritual human flesh and blood if either theory is true. So no, not potentially damaging to one’s health. (Unless per St. Paul one eats of it in an unethical manner!)
As to being ethically suspect, it wouldn’t be any more ethically suspect than gratefully appreciating the self-sacrifice of Christ on an instrument of torture and murder. Or of using the symbol of that instrument as the sign of our religion.
More to the point, if God the Son dies (in effect) in order for Nature to exist as such, and thus for us to exist as natural creatures, we live by ingesting the graciously given Son every day already, whether we believe in the Son or not. The unethical thing would be to trample underfoot as unworthy the sacrifice of the Son. In fact, any ethical breach at all necessarily involves our abuse of the grace of God.
In that sense, it’s actually the other way around!
The bread and wine are vegetable (unless milk in the bread counts); or else they cease to exist at all despite retaining the forms. The flesh and blood are spiritual so don’t count as meat for veggie/omni/carni purposes.
I gather that this is a big point for Catholic vegetarians: the Supper prefigures a time to come when we’ll no longer eat meat to survive but will live naturally by the fruits of plants (wheat and grapes being examples of those) and spiritually by receiving life regularly from Christ.
Wouldn’t Jesus lose parts of His spirit as He kept giving it to people?
(No. )
Or even from a more natural perspective, “How can we feed so great a multitude with only three little fish and five loaves?!”
And yet, in GosJohn’s Greek version of the incident, Jesus repeatedly insists that unless we “trôg” on His flesh and drink His blood, we have no life in us. The Greek term there is what would be used for an animal munching at a trough.
Probably He was retorting (in a typical rabbinic fashion) against His opponents’ attempt at discrediting what He was saying by their reducing it to an offensive oversimplification (similar to crawling back into the womb to be “born again”): He takes the offensive oversimplification and runs with it! But He does reassure the apostles afterward that He was talking about spiritual not natural flesh and blood.
That would fit a purely symbolic Protestant interpretation, but to be fair it would also fit a tran- or con-substantialist interpretation, too: they aren’t talking about natural flesh and blood, but the transfigured flesh and blood of Christ now in spiritual form. It’s really real, and actually more real than the natural elements, but no longer the natural elements constituting flesh and blood (no more than it’s the natural elements constituting bread and wine, which only occur in common union with the spiritual flesh and blood or which are totally transformed into the spiritual flesh and blood leaving behind only the forms).
Well I gues I’m really showing my ignorance here … oh, well, there’s only one way to learn …
So what would be the transubstationist’s answer to the microscope question? If I took pre-communion wine and analysed it, then re-ran the analysis post-communion would there be any physical difference at all? Surely this could easily remove some ideas about transubstantiation depending upon results.
OK, so when people talk about the bread becoming the body of christ what they mean is that it becomes infused/or changes to the spiritual body of christ, not a physical body. Are we talking about Jesus’s post-resurrection body, here - or something else? I’m pretty lost here - help!
So does this mean that: a) spiritual bodies post-resurrection are not physical or material in any way? b) that the spiritual body of christ has exactly the same atomic structure as bread? c) that eating a spiritual body (like an angel’s arm or God’s toe) is not cannabilism? d) that spiritual bodies still somehow need spiritual blood (wine)?
That doesn’t follow.
I see no ethical difficulty with appreciating the self-sacrifice or martyrdom of someone who was tortured to death for my benefit - say by dying for my national freedom, or the right to vote, or to protect my children from a maniac, or some other reason. But I do see it as at least weird, if not against the basic dignity of human persons, to then begin chomping on that martyr’s left foot!
The atonement only becomes ethically suspect if it’s interpreted in terms of propitiating an angry God via human sacrifice. In which case it is ethicaly suspect! Indeed, human sacrifice is just plain wrong as far as I can see.
I’m sorry, I have no idea what this means???
Again, let me get this clear. Transubstantiationists aren’t claiming that the bread turns into the physical body of christ, rather that it turns (or gets an infusion?) into the spiritual body of christ - is that right? And spiritual blood is not made of any material (whether animal, vegetable or mineral)? Would it be closer in substance to mind, then? So it’s more like eating someone’s mind or the Holy Spirit?
No idea! I guess it depends upon what giving His spirit meant - whether it was literal, metaphorical etc And whether it was divided and separated as it was given. I guess you’re saying that when the bread turns into Christ’s spiritual body this body is not separated off from the rest of christ’s (infinite?) spiritual body - is that what you mean? I still can’t understand how this works.
Given the passover(ish) context, isn’t it more likely just strong metaphor? I’m no biblical scholar, so I can’t say I have any idea about this.
Cool. So we need to decide the issue on other non-bilical grounds. At the moment I can’t see the advantage of adopting a transubstantiation perspective if there’s no clear biblical warrant for it - it seems to have too many other problems or oddities attached to it. Help!
If you took Jesus’ pre-Ascension (or in a somewhat different way even His post-Ascension) flesh and blood and analyzed it under a microscope, would there be any physical indication that He was also fully divine? No, probably not.
Tran- and con-substantialists would each reply with that: the change being made isn’t one that can be detected by even the closest physical observations. Their positions never involved that such a change would be detectable to begin with. A lack of detectability would be no negative evidence against either of their claims, consequentially.
Consubstantialists would say that the positive testability for bread and wine lends positive evidence in favor of consubstantiation (physical bread and wine as well as spiritual flesh and blood) compared to transubstantiation (which no longer has any physical bread and wine despite all natural appearances). Other things being equal that would be true, but transubstantialists think there are other reasons for expecting the bread and wine to be replaced totally by spiritual flesh and blood leaving over only the appearance of bread and wine.
Right, they’re talking about the transfigured post-resurrection body, which can appear at multiple times and places simultaneously and under different appearances.
Consubs would (if I understand them correctly) say the bread is infused with the spiritual body.
Transubs would (if I understand them correctly) say the bread is replaced by the spiritual body.
Consubs would say transubs are talking about something like Docetism, where Christ only appeared to be Incarnate, or a related position where the body was simply left behind in the grave or annihilated (notice the topical conjunction with universalism’s debates vs ECT and anni by the way!) to be replaced by the spiritual body.
Transubs would say consubs are talking about the spiritual humanity (and divinity) of Christ effectively re-incarnating over and over again in natural elements, and worse the natural elements aren’t even human but are bread and wine!
I tend to lean in favor of the transubs here: they aren’t claiming Christ is re-Incarnating (and would strongly reject that notion), so there is no conceptual problem with the natural elements being completely replaced (yet retaining forms that allow our culinary interaction). They aren’t claiming Docetism instead of Incarnation, they’re talking about transfigured Incarnation replacing natural elements. If the transfigured Incarnate Christ appeared outside the door to my room, He would have to either displace or replace the air molecules; if He did so invisibly, He would retain the natural form of the air molecules (or anyway that would be one way to manifest invisibly). He wouldn’t be combining with the air molecules in the Incarnate body. (He could combine with the air molecules as a different kind of manifestation, as in a whirlwind.)
(a) Yes, they’re material insofar as they manifest (as resurrected bodies) in the natural world. Transubs would emphasize that the transformed bread and wine are still material as the spiritual flesh and blood of Christ, just not as bread and wine anymore (despite all natural appearances).
(b) No; it either combines with the atomic structure of bread (per the consubs) or replaces the atomic structure of bread (per the transubs–while still behaving like the atomic structure of bread, including in regard to investigation of its properties).
© Yes, eating a spiritual body is not cannabilism. Especially in the forms of bread and wine. For one thing, that wouldn’t even be possible without the permission of the spirit of the spiritual body.
(d) I don’t think either position requires that a spiritual body needs spiritual blood per se. It may be worth noting, though, that the Roman Catholic Church (I don’t know about the Eastern Orthodox on this point or other high Catholic communions) teaches that the spiritual flesh and blood is present in both the bread and the wine. This was part of the point back during some medieval time and place for forbidding the laity to eat of the bread (or to drink of the wine, I forget which): a notion was being spread around that the wine was only the blood and the bread only the flesh (also, communicants were being sloppy with one of the elements and the Church was trying to protect them from ‘wasting’ any of the flesh and blood, trodding it underfoot as unworthy, etc.) So for that time and place the Church dictated that the neater of the two elements would be consumed by the laymen; but the flesh and blood of Christ was communicated by whichever element of the Mass was provided.
You left out, or downplayed, the salient point of the comparison: the instrument of torture and murder.
This was so disturbing to people who lived with cultural memory (much moreso literal experience!) of actual crucifixions, that the cross wasn’t promoted as the visual symbol of Christianity until several centuries later.
It’s one thing to be grateful to someone who died on a cross for doing so. It’s quite another thing to appreciate and glory in the cross itself, an utter violation of the basic human dignity of that person, as an expression of gratitude to that person.
Catholics have had different concepts of the atonement, of course, including the idea of propitiating an angry God via human sacrifice; and I agree that that would be ethically suspect (and just plain wrong).
But divine self-sacrifice for the sake of reconciling sinners to God (and even for the sake of propitiating sinners to God), is not the same thing. That’s an extreme charity by the highest possible authority.
I’ll have to point back to an earlier comment of mine to Cindy for an introduction to that topic.
It’s material when manifested in Nature, but it isn’t composed of physical flesh and blood. It’s also more real (so to speak) than physical flesh and blood, or physical bread and wine for that matter.
So yes, it’s more like eating the Logos/Word of God, or breathing in the Holy Spirit. (Catholics actually appeal to the various scriptural images of eating the Word of God in favor of transub.) Substantially it’s transfigured flesh and blood, so the properties have changed compared to natural flesh and blood.
Right. Although even if it was separated off there would still be infinite spiritual body. But what I gather from study of their position is that in Communion the faithful share in the one single body being manifested at particular places and times, not that the one body is spawning off distinct pieces of itself: if that was true we wouldn’t be sharing in the full communion of the body of Christ.
I used to think so myself; but then the Passover(ish) context turned out to have strong connections to a special kind of bread in Jewish religious ritual being itself the visible presence of God Most High!
I’m still pretty sure Jesus was counter-trolling His opponents, so to speak , using a type of rabbinic retort strategy: you want to reduce what I’m saying to something grotesque for purposes of rejecting it in mockery? (Rabbinic retort strategy #1, used by Jesus’ rabbinic opponents.) Fine, but it’s still true, so if you insist on thinking about it that way I’ll put it in those terms to emphasize it’s still true! (Rabbinic retort strategy #2, used by Jesus in replying to them after they tried strategy #1.)
The Biblical grounds (even at that place in GosJohn, although they aren’t at all obvious) are stronger than I originally expected–rather like the grounds for Christian universalism --but it would be easier for me to refer you back to the book I recommended to Cindy. While I still think the author takes things a bit too far, I was still impressed by it.
Yes, I agree with “no substantiation”. Yet, I do not think that the bread and wine of the eucharist are only symbolic. While they do represent the body and blood of our Lord, there’s more to it than that.
If we are truly eating the bread and drinking the wine in a worthy manner and with understanding, then there is something happening in our hearts and minds which corresponds to what is happening outwardly. Outwardly, we are merely eating bread and drinking wine. But inwardly and spiritually we are being nourished by Christ. That is what He meant when He said, “…unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53). This is what it means to say that the eucharist is “a sacrament,” that is, “a means of grace.”
Thanks for taking the time to answer my queries Jason I know it’s much easier to ask quetions than to answer them, so thank you.
I still know very little about this topic, so can I ask more questions?
At what point does the tansformation/infusion end? Or is the once-bread-now-the-spiritual-but-literal-body-of-Christ altered permanently?
I believe the elements physically remain bread and wine (or for some, grape juice) but take on the significance of the Body and Blood of Christ to those who take communion in faith. To those who don’t, it is simply bread or wine.
This is also the sense I get as I read the 39 Articles.
That’s a great question!–and I don’t know what the official dogmatics are on it.
My guess is that, if transubstantiation is true, the transformation never ends, but then neither should the material be expelled from the body, since (according to the theory) it has been completely replaced and only manifests naturally as a form now. Whether people who live only on the bread and wine (like that German nun during WW2) never expel waste thereby, I don’t know. (My expectation is that they still do, but technically that intuitive expectation is a logical invalidity, based on an inductive analogy that, per the theory, wouldn’t obtain, combined with a begging of the question: of course transubstantiation isn’t true, so of course I ought to expect expelled waste just like in any other instance of consumed food and drink.)
If consubstantiation is true, my guess is that the infusion ends at a point of spiritual operation in the eating and drinking of the material: the eonian life goes into us spiritually, uncombining from the natural material (except maybe insofar as our body incorporates that natural material), which then is processed normally as waste.
I’m sure consubstantialists would regard any waste expelled as evidence that transsubstantiation cannot be true; but I don’t know what (if any) scientific experiments have been done along this line. It ought to be possible for a scatologist (and/or a urologist?) to check expelled waste under controlled conditions to detect processed material from the bread and/or wine. That even ought to have been possible for several centuries already!–that kind of science has been around longer than Christendom itself, though not in the refined modes possible through modern technology. (But still pretty refined in its own older ways.)
I thought I should poke around the recent Great Catechism to see what the main Western transubstantialists had to say on the topic.
I quote that mainly to make clear that what I was calling “form” (in a somewhat Platonic sense) is called “species” in RCC dogmatic terminology.
Item 1377 reads: “The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist.”
I’m sure the point of this was to address the question of whether the Host (as bread or as wine) has some kind of shelf life with an expiration date, so to speak; but it does inadvertently seem to address the question of bodily processing. I’m very unsure in what way it inadvertently addresses it…
Pope Paul VI, in a 1966 allocution, seems to forbid scientific investigation into what happens to the species:
Paul VI was the immediate predecessor of JP2; I’m sure I have this Encyclical in a software collection, but I can’t access that program on this computer anymore.
Pius IX, in July 1875, issued a Decree of the Holy Office, emphasizing (by denial of suggested propositions) that the natural operations of the bread and wine cease with the substances. The suggested explanation, being there denied, was that the body and blood of Christ, although fully replacing the substances of the bread and wine, begin to act like bread and wine in natural behaviors (as well as acting supernaturally in fashions only proper to the spiritually transformed body and blood of Christ). I don’t understand how Pius could validly deny that the substance of Christ’s body and blood begins to act like bread and wine in natural behaviors, though, since if it did not the transubstantiated material could not even be mis-identifiable as “bread” and “wine”! (Possibly he wasn’t strictly denying that, but some other subtle distinction, the gist of which doesn’t come through the translation into English. This and the following paragraph are based on the official English translation of Denzinger’s Sources of Catholic Dogma.)
Curiously, Gregory XI, sometime during his reign in the 1370s, condemned various notions proposed by Peter of Bonageta and/or John of Lato intended to protect the honor of the body of Christ by suggesting that under conditions of dishonor the material transubstantiates back to bread (or wine, but bread fit the proposed examples better). One of the condemned notions was that the body of Christ is snatched up during the chewing of the bread and so is not deposited in the stomach. I can’t tell from the form of the denial whether the Pope (and Inquisitors) thought the Body of Christ was deposited in the stomach!–but the other two denials involved the notions that the Host returns to the substance of bread when cast “into the sewer, the mud, or some disgraceful place”, or is consumed by an animal.
(This might actually have some relevance to Christian universalism, by the way, since the point is to affirm that God persists in the action of Christ despite dishonor and material shame: He does not flee from being dishonored but endures to accomplish His purposes.)
Interesting: I have to say that the more you try to explain the more the explanations given push me away from transubstabtiation - they seem so forced, so ad-hoc, so odd.
But I will persevere - learning is learning regardless
I guess I should have asked first, but *pecisely when *does the host become transmuted into the spiritual body of Christ? I guess if we know exactly when it changes, and then exactly what properties it has when changed, and then exactly how long it reamins changed, we can do all kinds of interesting though experiments on it.
Yes, I thought I ought to mention some of the sticking points myself. 
The apparent warning not to test something that ought by its implications to have various observable results, seems like an attempt at avoiding disconfirmation. I understand that the terms of the theory are such that various types of disconfirmation would be inapplicable, but if the theory implies the apparent forms aren’t going to keep behaving like natural material after a certain point, a defense against examination of whether the forms do keep behaving looks very suspicious.
Similarly, a denial that the forms behave like the replaced natural material, seems very suspiciously at odds with extremely common observation and practice with the purported forms: to give a pertinent example, there would have been no need to deny that Christ un-substantiates the elements back to bread and wine under dishonorable conditions if the forms didn’t observably behave like bread and wine (and so would be nibbled on by mice)!
I do recommend reading the book I linked to, as it helps explain why the early Church held the doctrine (whether as tran- or as con-substantiation) and why Catholic churches still regard the doctrine as important to defend even if they sometimes paint themselves into corners in the process.
The host changes at the moment of proper blessing by a properly appointed priest. (Whether the priest is himself in good ethical standing with God is irrelevant for this purpose, although he may eat and drink the body and blood to his own condemnation: God does the miracle, the priest is only the local instrument.) It stays transubstantiated exactly as long as the (forms or species of the) bread and wine remain functionally bread and wine, whether as drops or as crumbs. To me this obviously means that the host behaves functionally like bread and wine!–papal declarations apparently otherwise notwithstanding.
I have to remind myself that the doctrine may generally be true but hasn’t been explained and defended inerrantly/infallibly by its (ostensibly infallible) chief proponents. I can see several good reasons why they went with the doctrine.
I don’t quite know where to go with this. Ultimately we are sustained by God. The food we eat comes from God, and as He created the world out of Himself, then I guess you could say that every bite we take, every glass of water and breath of air is God. In Him we live and move and have our being. Our life is in Him and comes from Him. Are we made of particles or waves? Or are we at the foundation, made of God? Did God die a death in order to give life to us? Does He continue to feed us from Himself? Um, I think He has to, if we’re to be fed at all.
A newborn is made of the body of its mother (with a tiny though vital and continuing contribution from dad, at the beginning). It is nourished from its mother’s blood the whole time it’s growing within her. Does that mean it has eaten her body to produce its own body? Well, in a sense, I guess it has. Has she died a death? Perhaps – in a sense. She has fed the baby from her own body and will likely continue to do so for a time.
If our Lord is especially present in the communion host I don’t know that it should be expected to follow that upon laboratory analysis we would find that the bread and wine are now flesh and blood though they look like and taste like and smell like bread and wine. They can be bread and wine and still be Him. And if the presence of a priest is necessary, well, I am a believer and therefore a priest. So are you. Every time I eat food I try to remember where it came from and to acknowledge that it is He who is my source of life, and that except I eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, I have no life in me, for His flesh is the true bread and His blood is the true drink. It doesn’t sit well on our ears, but that’s what He said, and that’s what He did.
If you don’t like to think of it as eating and drinking in this sense, then maybe it will seem more acceptable to think of it as a mother suckling her baby. It seems to me, with the obvious absence of the violence (which is past), it amounts to the same thing. He is the source and the only source of our lives, both natural and spiritual.
…http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/eating/picnic.gif
