Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/652

 EITCHARIST

580

EUCHARIST

all its essential details. For we have the two extremes of conversion, namely, bread and wine as the terminus a quo, and the Body and Blood of Christ as the termi- nus ad quem. Furthermore, the intimate connexion between the cessation of one extreme and the appear- ance of the other seems to be preserved by the fact, that both events are the results, not of two independ- ent processes, as, e. g. annihilation and creation, but of one single act, since, according to the purpose of the Almighty, the substance of the bread and wine departs in order to make room for the Body and Blood of Christ. Lastly, we have the commune tertium in the unchanged appearances of bread and wine, under which appearances the pre-existent Christ assumes a new, sacramental mode of being, and without which His Body and Blood could not be partaken of by men. That the consequence of Transubstantiation, as a con- version of the total substance, is the transition of the entire substance of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, is the express doctrine of the Church (Council of Trent, Sess. XIII, can. ii). Thus were condemned as contrary to faith the antiquated view of Durandus, that only the substantial form (Jorma substantialis) of the bread underwent conver- sion, while the primary matter {materia prima) re- mained, and, especially, Luther's doctrine of Consub- stantiation, i. e. the coexistence of the substance of the bread with the true Body of Christ. Thus, too, the theory of Impanation advocated by Osiander and cer- tain Berengarians, and according to which a hypo- static union is supposed to take place between the sub- stance of the bread and the God-man (impanatio = Deus panis factus), is authoritatively rejected. So the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation sets up a mighty bulwark around the dogma of the Real Pres- ence and constitutes in itself a distinct doctrinal arti- cle, which is not involved in that of the Real Presence, though the doctrine of the Real Presence is necessarily contained in that of Transubstantiation. It was for this very reason that Pius VI, in his dogmatic Bull "Auctorem fidei" (1794) against the Jansenistic pseudo-Synod of Pistoia (1786), protested most vigor- ously against suppressing this "scholastic question", as the synod had advised pastors to do.

(b) In the mind of the Church, Transubstantiation has been so intimately bound up with the Real Pres- ence, that both dogmas have been handed down to- gether from generation to generation, though we can- not entirely ignore a dogmatico-historical development. The total conversion of the substance of bread is ex- pressed clearly in the words of Institution: "This is my body ". These words form, not a theoretical, but a practical proposition, whose essence consists in this, that the objective identity between subject and predi- cate is effected and verified only after the words have all been uttered, not unlike the pronouncement of a king to a subaltern: " You are a major", or, " You are a captain", which would immediately cause the pro- motion of the officer to a higher command. When, therefore, He Who is All Truth and All Power said of the bread: "This is my body", the bread became, through the utterance of these words, the Body of Christ; consequently, on the completion of the sen- tence the substance of bread was no longer present, but the Body of Christ under the outward appearance of bread. Hence the bread must have become the Body of Christ, i. e. the former must have been con- verted into the latter. The words of Institution were at the .same time the words of Transubstantiation. Indeed the actual manner in which the absence of the bread and the presence of the Body of Christ is effected, is not read into the words of Institution but strictly and cxcgctically deduced from them. The Calvinists, tluTcfore, are perfectly right when they reject the Lutheran doctrine of Consubstantia- tion as a fiction, with no foundation in Scripture. For had Christ intended to assert the coexistence of His

Body with the substance of the bread, He would not have expressed a simple identity between hoc and corpus by means of the copula est, but would have resorted to some such expression as: " This bread con- tains my body", or, "In this bread is my body." Had He desired to constitute bread the sacramental receptacle of His Body, He would have had to state this expressly, for neither from the nature of the case nor according to common parlance can a piece of bread be made to signify the receptacle of a human body. On the other hand, the synecdoche is plain in the case of the Chalice: "This is my blood", i. e. the contents of the Chalice are my blood, and hence no longer wine.

Regarding tradition, the earliest witnesses, as Ter- tuUian and Cj'prian, could hardly have given any partic- ular consideration to the genetic relation of the natural elements of bread and wine to the Body and Blood of Christ, or to the manner in which the former were con- verted into the latter; for even Augustine was de- prived of a clear conception of Transubstantiation, so long as he was helil in the bonds of Platonism. On the other hand, complete clearness on the subject had been attained by writers as early as Cyril of Jerusalem, Theodoret of CjTrhus, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria in the East, and by Ambrose and the later Latin writers in the West. Eventually the West became the classic home of scientific perfec- tion in the difficult doctrine of Transubstantiation. The claims of the learned work of the Anglican Dr. Pusey (The Doctrine of the Real Presence as con- tained in the Fathers, Oxford, 1S55), who denied the cogency of the patristic argimient for Transubstantia- tion, have been met and thoroughly answered by Cardinal Franzelin (De Euchar., Rome, 1SS7, thes. xiv). The argument from tratlition is strikingly con- firmed by the ancient liturgies, whose touching and beautiful prayers express the idea of conversion in the clearest manner. Many examples may be found in Renaudot, "Liturgioe orient." (2nd ed., Frankfort, 1847); Assemani, "Codex liturg." (13 vols., Rome, 1749-66); Denzinger, "Ritus Orientalium" (2 vols., Wurzburg, 1864). Concerning the Adduction Theory of the Scotists and the Production Theory of the Thomists, see Pohle, " DogmatLk " (3rd ed., Paderborn, 1908), III, 237 sqq.

(4) The Permanence and Adorableness of the Blessed Eucharist. — Since Luther arbitrarily restricted the Real Presence to the moment of reception (in usu, non extra), the Council of Trent (Sess. XIII, can. iv) bj' a special canon emphasized the fact, that immediately after the Consecration Christ is truly present and, con- sequently, does not make His Presence dependent upon the act of eating or drinking. On the contrary. He continues His Eucharistic Presence even in the consecrated Hosts and Sacred particles that remain on the altar or in the ciborium after the distribution of Holy Communion. In the deposit of faith the Real Presence and the Permanence of Presence are so closely allied, that in the miml of the Church both con- tinue on as an undivided whole. And rightly so; for just as Christ promised His Flesh and Blood as meat and drink, i. e. as something permanent (ef. John, vi, 50 sqq.), so, when He said: "Take ye, and eat. This is my body", the Apostles received from the hand of the Lord His Sacred Body, which was already objec- tively present and did not first become so in the act of partaking. This non-dependence of the Real Pres- ence upon the jxctual reception is manifested very clearly in the case of the Chalice, when Christ said: " Driiik ye all of this. For [cnim] this is my Blood." Here the act of drinking is evidently neither the cause nor the conditio sine qu& non for the presence of Christ's Blood.

Much as he disliked it, even Calvin had to acknowl- edge the evident force of the argument from tradition (Instit. IV, xvii, §39). Not only have the Fathers, and among them Chrysostom with special vigour, de-