An Overview of What I’m Up To
I’ve tried to concentrate on the general speculative, or `metaphysical’, task of making sense of created being, abstract as well as concrete, in light of Christian beliefs. I’ve tried to avoid too much in the way of theological speculation and certainly have and will avoid questioning the basic truths of Christianity—they are the basis of true human thought and of all possible true understandings of Creation. Since there are contexts in which histories and texts are understood, as well as languages and speculative systems in which those histories and texts are stated and then understood, this doesn’t mean a slavish acceptance of, for example, the traditional understanding of the Christmas story as being history in the same sense as the story of the missionary activities and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; the Christmas story seems, to this author, to have the literary feel of myth whereas even those stories of the mission of Jesus which raise questions of detail have an earthy, historical feel to them.
Since my work has led to much effort in understanding the Body of Christ, I’m being forced to deal with the Sacraments which are the most important human means of forming that Body and working toward salvation.
I’ve spoken often in sometimes vague terms of the need to understand the way in which we have both individual and communal human being, as images of the one God who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The Sacraments, as well as the sacramental relationships of mundane reality, would seem to be one of the glues by which the local (the individual) is bound into the global (human community and ultimately the Body of Christ) while continuing to exist as an individual.
Consider this essay as an effort to provide another part of the general framework by which Creation, at concrete and abstract levels, can be seen and understood as a work of the God of Jesus Christ.
The Real Presence in Light of Modern Knowledge of Creation
In a world where Christians respected God’s Creation, this should be a primary test of a particular form of theology: can the revealed truths of the Bible be stated in terms of that Creation and, in particular, in terms of what we know of the world in which we live, the world into which Jesus of Nazareth was born, the world in which that same Jesus spoke of His own divinity and spoke of the bread and wine He was sharing with the Apostles being His own Body and Blood.
Does it all make sense in Christian terms? Is Creation unified in its basic being or are there some truths for this mortal realm and other truths for the world of the resurrected? Could there then be an infinity of worlds with an infinity of different bodies of truth?
Maybe we should treat Christian revelations as fairy-tales which are somehow more true than the concreteness of this world? Or maybe we should be more consistent Modernists and treat those revelations as being fairy-tales in a more complete sense, communicating only some vague, abstract truths?
The path I’ve chosen is to respond to reality as revealed by modern empirical knowledge, that of physics and chemistry and biology and also that of history and creative fiction.
The Council of Trent taught (with some proper qualifications) the language of a substantialist transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ—`transubstantiation’ was the term they approved. Apparently, Aquinas himself used such language while teaching that God isn’t substance but pure existence, a claim made even earlier thought not with the supporting network of ideas which Aquinas created in his Summas. There is a deep inconsistency which became a great problem when modern science, especially quantum physics, cast some doubt upon the understanding of matter as substance.
It can be said of the Summas of Aquinas that the Summa Contra Gentiles (or lesser Summa) was a system which began with created being and moved toward God while the Summa Theologicae (or greater Summa) began with God and worked its way down to created being. This isn’t a situation where we can envision a God who sits on a throne and looks down upon a world of substance which He rules externally, Zeus squeezed into a Biblical form. (See Proving the Existence of Zeus.) To move forward, we need to recognize that modern empirical sciences have provided views of spacetime and of matter which are fully consistent with the radical understanding of St John the Evangelist: the world exists because God first loved it. Or: relationships are primary and stuff (substance) comes from relationships.
Whatever happens when bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, it shouldn’t be described primarily as a change in substance, transubstantiation is the word chosen to bear such a heavy burden. What happens when bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ is a change in God’s chosen relationship to stuff in which the Son of God is already present. All things were made through that Son and, since relationships create stuff (in the sense of “creation from nothingness” and also in the sense of shaping some stuff already existing), then all things come into existence as the result of the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the relationships God chooses to have with contingent being—what He chose to create. We are told by St John that all things are made through the Son of God and are thus of God.
Creation is shaped from truths God manifested as the very abstract being which I often refer to as the `raw stuff’ of Creation and, as such, is something of an image of the Almighty. Seen as thoughts, these basic truths are an image of the mind of God though not the entire mind for sure; seen as love, these basic truths are an image of the heart of God though not the entire heart for sure; seen as acts of creation, these basic truths are an image of the hands of God though not encompassing the entirety of what His hands be capable of.
From the abstract realms of Creation, God created a world sufficient to be the home of a creature with which the Son of God could share a nature, emptying Himself to become one of us.
So, by the Holy Spirit, the Son of God was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
The Son of God was already, in a sense, the entirety of man, already the perfect man or Body of Christ—at least in the sense of `nature’ as used by Christian metaphysicians though not the entirety in that He chose to have, even to need, companions born into the mortal realm. In a similar sense, He had been that perfect man or Body of Christ before (ontologically or temporally) God laid the foundations of Creation. I write with some qualification, “in a sense,” to communicate that we are on dangerous grounds here. Some ways of writing and speaking will prove ever dangerous and some will prove to lead to outright heresies. We should not avoid dangers because following God’s thoughts through exploration and analysis of created being isn’t an activity for those seeking security and certainty—those can be found more readily in the over-simplified pietistic or heretical versions of Christian thought.
When Christ was conceived, “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” He took on a particular nature, entering the strange state of being one Person but having two natures, divine and human.
Christ took on a particular nature and yet remained God and Creator, remained the Son of God and retained His divine nature; the manifested thoughts constituting the raw stuff of Creation were yet His thoughts as well as the thoughts of Father and Holy Spirit. Since God is a unity and so is each of Father and Son and Holy Spirit, the raw stuff of Creation is also divine heart and divine hands as well as divine thoughts.
We’re now in position, if somewhat a sketchy position, to describe the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. In fact, under my understanding of knowledge as itself being an encapsulation of some greater or lesser part or aspect of reality, an `explanation’ isn’t possible and it isn’t desirable to be seeking such an illusion in this age when we know from modern neurosciences that St Thomas Aquinas was correct in saying that human nature in its higher form, mind or soul as you will, has innate properties and components but those are in a primitive state and need to be better shaped by responses to the external and internal realities in which we live. We are not born with immaterial organs named `mind’ or `soul possessing a grasp of mathematical truths and logical truths and moral truths.
The Real Presence is a more open communication between Christ as yet present in all of Creation including the bread and wine as offered by men to God. As Christ took up a human nature, so He takes up human food as His own, food already incorporated as His Body and Blood and to be shared with all those who come to His table, even those who come in faith and hope and love but can’t directly share because of one problem or another. We who receive communion as individuals are being bound more tightly into the Body of Christ; our communal human nature is being strengthened as we eat what we are becoming and what is increasingly us.
What Have I Accomplished?
The above is far from `radical’ or `modern’ enough to satisfy me as being a fully acceptable and plausible restatement of a modern Christian understanding of the Real Presence of Christ, yet it is a movement toward an understanding in terms of modern empirical knowledge and speculative understandings of at least this particular world, this concrete level of Creation. This is to say that the above explanation indicates something about some `glue’ which can bind the local (individual) to the global (communal or even ultimately Body of Christ) without obliterating or obscuring the local. Much more needs to be thought and said and done, but that will be the work of a multitude of thinkers, including poets and musicians and artists, over a number of years. When this work seems to be reasonably complete and when Creation seems to be simple after all, it will undoubtedly be time to start developing a still richer and more complex way of understanding Creation.