At a dinner party the other day, I sat next to a charming and exceedingly clever woman. Though I’ve known her for many years, until that evening the subject of religion never came up.
However, the proximity of Easter made such exclusion impossible, and my dinner companion said she was Presbyterian. As such, she thought the whole idea of transubstantiation (Eucharistic bread and wine turning into the body and blood of Christ) was nonsensical.
I began to mumble something about Aristotle with his substances and accidents, but stopped myself in mid-sentence. Discussing such things with a charming woman at a boozy party is a social faux pas, a crime worse than theological ignorance.
So instead of boring her by whispering sweet philosophical nothings into her ear, I’m going to bore you in writing, though I hope not too much.
Christian theology is basically interpretation of Scripture, which according to believers is the word of God. But God was an exceptionally gifted writer who used a variety of techniques: straight talk, poetic imagery, metaphors and other figures of speech, parables, novelistic narration.
Such virtuosity, incidentally, is sometimes used as proof of authenticity: human writers began to learn all such narrative techniques only when the novel took its place on the literary landscape in the 18th century.
Since the Evangelists couldn’t be confused with Messrs Richardson and Fielding, one has to believe God himself was moving their quills. By themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to make it up, as was indirectly stipulated by Tertullian (Credo quia absurdum).
All in all, it’s undeniable that some Biblical pronouncements are literal and some are figurative. Much of theology is about understanding which is which and converting such understanding into doctrine.
This leaves room for arbitrary interpretations: various denominations choose to treat as figurative the same passages other denominations understand literally, and vice versa. And cultured atheists treat the Bible as merely well-written science fiction and read it for its prose only (especially the KJV).
Relevant to my aborted dinnertime conversation are two passages in the New Testament, both becoming even more poignant at this time of the year:
“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” (Matthew 26: 26)
And,
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6: 53-54)
Now, according to Catholic doctrine, which Protestants, such as my Presbyterian friend, consider nonsensical, the Eucharistic bread and wine turn in substance into the body and blood of Christ. The highlighted words are key.
They don’t eliminate the mystery of the Eucharist or, for that matter, any other Christian dogma. But they put the mystery on a philosophical footing.
The philosophy comes from Aristotle’s teaching on substances and accidents, the former being the metaphysical essence of things and the latter their outer properties and attributes. To illustrate, in a crude way guaranteed to make my philosophically educated friends gasp, just look at a tree.
It may be pollarded or not, in bloom or not, in leaf or not, robust or dying, but it will remain the same tree in substance. All the permutations above, on the other hand, are what Aristotle called accidents. This is confirmed by committed urbanists who sneer at any request to identify a particular tree (“It’s a tree, innit?”).
The same basic teaching reappears in Kant’s notions of noumena and phenomena, and in any number of other philosophies dealing with the nature of reality. In Catholic doctrine, the substance of the bread and wine taken at communion changes into the body and blood of Christ, while the outward appearance of the treats remains the same.
In some Protestant denominations, especially Calvinist ones like Presbyterianism, the bread and wine are merely symbols, metaphors or ‘pneumatic’ reminders of Christ’s presence. As Calvin put it, “the Spirit truly unites things separated in space”, but Christ’s body and blood aren’t physically present at communion.
Such are the crude outlines of the profound and nuanced issues involved. These can’t be blithely dismissed out of hand, in my friend’s manner, or stupidly described as a form of cannibalism, as atheists often do. But no one can deny their existence.
Some of history’s greatest minds pondered and debated the doctrine of the Real Presence for centuries, and they’ll doubtless continue to do so in perpetuity. It’s up to individual Christians to decide whether to dip into such waters just below the surface, more deeply, or not at all.
But only some familiarity, no matter how cursory, issues the license to pronounce on such matters. Alas, this basic requirement is nowadays routinely ignored, and not just in this area.
“I’m entitled to my opinion” has become a buzz phrase of modernity. Whenever I hear it uttered in defence of obvious ignorance, I always reply: “Yes, but you aren’t entitled to an audience.” Alas, the idea that strong opinions ending up in the public domain must start from at least some knowledge has fallen by the wayside.
The counterintuitive assumption that all men are equal leads inexorably to an even sillier one, that all opinions are equal. This is guaranteed to reduce thinking to sloganeering, which is especially noticeable in politics.
In religion, most believers would be better off if they simply accepted Church dogmas just because the Church says so. The Apostolic and Nicaean Creeds are as far as most believers have to go. Those who choose to go beyond that point and delve into the tremendous corpus of Christian theology and philosophy, will be richly rewarded, but such inquisitiveness is by no means necessary.
What’s not just unnecessary but offensive is self-confident promulgation of ignorance. Especially when it proceeds from the ideology of equality so dear to every modern heart.