Why do Catholics believe the Eucharist is physically Christ’s body and blood when it looks exactly like bread and wine?
Last week I addressed how faith, trust, and sacred scripture help provide our basic understanding that the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Jesus. This week I would like to review the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist from a philosophical viewpoint. I reference the 20 Answers book series from Catholic Answers Press entitled “The Eucharist.” (www.catholic.com)
In order to understand why we believe the Eucharist becomes the actual body and blood of Christ after it is consecrated at Mass, we must understand two philosophical ideas: substance and accident. A ‘substance’ is what something is: an ‘accident’ is what a substance possesses – you might say its ingredients, its physical properties. For example, an apple (a substance) has many accidents. It has skin of a particular color, a certain weight, shape, taste, and so on. These accidents could change, and the apple would remain an apple (that is, the apple could come in a different color or size). The substance, the apple, remains an apple regardless of the change in its accidents.
When it comes to the Eucharist, the Church teaches that after consecration the substance of the bread and wine actually changes and becomes the body and blood of Christ. But although the substance of the bread and wine changes, the accidents of the bread and wine—what we perceive of these substances—remain. This is why the eucharistic host still looks and tastes like bread and the precious blood still looks and tastes like wine. The bread and wine have not transformed, because the form or appearance of the bread and wine has not changed. Instead, it is the substance of the bread and wine that has changed, and so Catholics teach that during consecration the bread and wine have been transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ.
However, the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers rejected transubstantiation, believing that it was unbiblical and nonsensical. Luther said, “[I]t is an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words, to understand ‘bread’ to mean ‘the form, or accidents of bread,’ and ‘wine’ to mean ‘the form, or accidents of wine.’ Why do they not also understand all other things to mean their forms or accidents?”
The answer to Luther’s question is that Jesus referred to bread as his body and the wine as his blood. Jesus did not say, “This bread contains my body” or “I am in this wine.” Jesus said the bread and wine were his body and blood. Thus, the only logical conclusion is that although the accidents of the bread and wine that we perceive have remained, the substance, or what these things are, has changed into Christ’s body and blood.
Other critics of this doctrine object that the term transubstantiation is found neither in the Bible nor in the writings of the Church Fathers for the first thousand years of the Church’s history. But the reason the term was not used among the early Church Fathers was because there was no disagreement among them about the nature of the Eucharist. They unanimously agreed that the Eucharist represented in a physical and real way the body and blood of Christ. This doctrine was defined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and further defined at the Council of Trent in 1551.
By eating the Body and drinking the Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, we become united to the person of Christ through his humanity. In being united to the humanity of Christ, we are at the same time united to his divinity. "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him" (Jn 6:56).
September 8, 2023