Staunch Hylomorphism and Transubstantiation

Aristotelian natural philosophy, also known as “hylomorphism,” has the capacity to treat middle-sized things, like human beings, wafers of bread, and goblet-filling bits of wine, as first-class citizens of our ontology, that is, as substances.  Substances, on this view, are unified wholes composed of matter and form, whose substantial forms impose certain powers and potentialities upon their material parts.. The nature of a substance is determined simultaneously in both bottom-up (parts to whole) and top-down (whole to parts) directions. Christian philosophers from the time of Thomas Aquinas, have used this Aristotelian framework to elucidate theological doctrines, including the nature of the Eucharist.

Only something very like hylomorphism can accommodate the central importance that such doctrines as the Incarnation and the sacraments place on the ordinary, corporeal objects of everyday life. The liturgical and sacramental life is grounded not in the cosmic or the microscopic but in embodied, accessible, medium-scale realities, of which the Eucharist is both aparadigm and a metaphysical test.

The Sensible Qualities of the Host

During the Roman Rite which is known as ‘the Mass’, the priest utters the words of consecration—“This is my body… This is my blood”—over the bread and wine. According to Catholic doctrine, at this moment, the substances of bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, while their sensible appearances remain. After consecration, the Host still appears white, circular, flaky, bready in taste, etc. Logically, there are just four options:

1. These sensible qualities are illusory. Nothing there is really white, circular, flaky, etc.
2. These sensible qualities inhere in a piece of bread. Consequently, the bread is still in actual existence, and somehow the piece of bread is simultaneously also the body of Christ.
3. The sensible qualities inhere in the body of Christ alone.
4. The sensible qualities inhere in nothing at all but are sustained in existence of direct divine fiat.

Options 1 through 3 involve theologically or philosophically unacceptable consequences. Option 1, which treats the sensible qualities as mere illusion, requires God to be a cheap conjurer and deceiver. Options 2 and 3, , which claim that the accidents inhere either in the bread or in the body of Christrequire the human body of Christ to take on accidents that are clearly incompatible with the integrity of His human nature. Both options entail that Christ’s body possesses many thousands of tons of mass, including tons of undigested carbohydrates, water, and fats. They entail that His body is scattered across the face of the earth in millions of white, circular disks. They also entail that one cannot receive the blood of Christ under the species of bread, or the body of Christ under the species of blood, since the former are parts of Christ’s extended body but not of His blood, and the latter parts of His extended blood but not His body.  According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (par. 1377), “Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts.” This teaching is rooted in the authoritative formulation of the Council of Trent: “If anyone denies that, in the venerable sacrament of the Eucharist, the whole Christ is contained under each species and under each part of either species when separated, let him be anathema” (Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist, Session XIII, Canon III; Denzinger-Schönmetzer 1641). In Thomas Aquinas’s explanation, Jesus’ blood is present in the species of wine by virtue of the words of institution (the “power of the sacrament”), while the body and soul are present there by way of “real concomitance,” since body, blood, and soul form one, inseparable substance (ST III, Q76 a2). In a Cartesian framework, there is no such thing as real concomitance, and so the presence of the whole Christ under both species cannot be explained.

So, only option 4 is theologically and philosophically viable. But option 4 requires that we take accidents seriously as an ontological category, and this is something that only a hylomorphist can do. Certainly, option 4 makes no sense for the Cartesian. The closest a Cartesian can come to the category of accident is that property or feature (in the modern sense), but it makes no sense to suppose that a property could exist without a bearer. So it seems that a Cartesian is constrained to adopt Option 3, even though it is theologically inadequate.

Could the Cartesian adopt a trope theory? Tropes are the closest thing to Aristotelian accidents in contemporary analytic metaphysics. On such a view, a piece of bread is nothing but a bundle of tropes (individual accidents). Since the tropes persist, this means that the bread and wine also persist, forcing us to option 2.

Next time: “Body, blood, soul, and divinity.” More theological reasons for hylomorphism.