Toward A New Paradigm Of The Real Presence

by Roy Abraham Varghese

"But if every gram of material contains this tremendous energy, why did it go so long unnoticed? The answer is simple enough: so long as none of the energy is given off externally, it cannot be observed. It is as though a man who is fabulously rich should never spend or give away a cent; no one could tell how rich he was."

— Albert Einstein, "E=MC²", Out of My Later Years

Imagine a scenario where a well-known anchorman on a major television network announces on the evening news that scientists have now confirmed the ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation, the teaching that bread and wine change into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ during Mass. Given the fact that many people accept the veracity of the network news, it would hardly be a surprise if a majority of viewers accepted the anchorman's pronouncements without further ado. Likewise, in the domain of modern theology: if one of today's daring theologians propounds a radical new theory about the Eucharist, the burden of proof would already be stacked in his (or her) favor in much of the academic community.

The point of these two examples is this: Like it or not, most of us make up our minds or form our beliefs on the basis of "pronouncements" made by scientists, media persons, celebrities and other authority figures. Trust in authority is not bad when such trust is warranted — when the authority in question is truly an authority. When it comes to the Eucharist, the options are limited. If we believe that Jesus Christ is the God-man and that he teaches with authority, then we will believe the truths he taught. On the Eucharist, the New Testament texts seem clearly to indicate that he taught his Real Presence in what was once bread and wine. We have good reason to conclude that this is what he intended to teach because this was the interpretation adopted by all the Fathers, East and West, all the ancient liturgies and all the major Councils. In addition to these teachings, we have the supernatural verification offered by the great Eucharistic miracles of history in which the Host and the consecrated "wine" turned to actual Flesh and Blood, primarily in response to doubt and desecration, and the experiential verification offered by millions of the faithful across the world and across history.

What does it mean to say that the bread and wine at Mass change into the Body and Blood of Christ at the moment of consecration? The traditional description of this change is the doctrine of Transubstantiation — the substance of the bread and wine are changed but not its appearances. The purpose of the present essay is to offer a new paradigm drawn from contemporary experience to describe the mystery of this dramatic change. We are trying not to replace the language of Transubstantiation but to understand its truth in the context of another dimension — that of life at all levels. What takes place at consecration, we might say, is the transformation of lifeless matter into a vehicle of the divine Life and therefore every instance of the genesis of life — from the cellular level to the creation of the conscious self — is a pointer to the unfathomable mystery of this Event. A description is not an explanation, of course, and neither the doctrine of Transubstantiation, nor the version of it presented here diminish, in any respect, the depth of the mystery involved.

The emphasis here on the Eucharist as the vehicle of Divine Life mirrors the emphasis that Jesus himself placed both on his identity as Divine Life incarnate and the urgency of our receiving this Life: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). "Just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to his Son the possession of life in himself" (John 5:26). "I am the bread of life" (John 6:48). "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life" (6:54). "Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me" (6:57). "I come so that they might have life and have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). Here we see that (a) Jesus not only has the Divine Life but IS the Divine Life incarnate; (b) our eternal life depends on our living with his Divine Life; and, (c) to receive his Divine Life one must eat the flesh and drink the blood of "the bread of life." The focus on the Eucharist as the vehicle of Divine Life is important, above all, because the whole point of receiving communion is to receive the Divine Life, to be "partakers of the divine nature." (See graph.)

Right from the beginning, the Fathers of the Church recognized that the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood was not just another miracle. Remarkably, the closest analogy they could bring to bear in describing this event was the creation of the Universe from nothing. Both events represented changes of the most fundamental nature. While one described the coming to be of natural reality as a whole, the other was concerned with the transformation of the natural into the supernatural. Paradoxically, the latter transformation did not involve any change of appearance. The natural becomes the supernatural while retaining the appearance of the natural (and here there is an analogy — but only an analogy — in terms of identity of appearance between a living being and a non-living replica).

Metamorphic Creation

For our purposes here, these two ontologically fundamental miracles of nature may be described as "Creatio ex nihilo" and "metamorphic creation."

Creatio ex nihilo is the creation of physical reality as a whole out of nothing. Metamorphic creation is the transformation of an existing physical reality into a pre-existing supernatural reality while retaining the appearances of the physical reality.

Two things must be noted about these descriptions. In describing creatio ex nihilo as the creation of physical reality, we imply (intentionally) that the creation of non-physical realities involves distinct creative acts (be these direct or indirect in nature). In using the terms "metamorphic" and "creation" together, we mean something different from what the terms would mean if they were used separately (as is the case with the terms "Chinese philosophy"). We do not imply that there is only a change of form or shape of a thing that remains the same throughout (like the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly); nor do we imply that there is a creation out of nothing. The value of using the terms together is in highlighting the fact that the Event involved is a transformation of something already existing, but a transformation so fundamental that its nearest analogy is creation of something out of nothing. "Creation" is used because something that was previously not present is now here and "metamorphosis" conveys the truth that this new Presence comes through a transformation. The mystery of this transformation lies not just in the fact that one thing changes totally into another but in What it changes into.

Both acts of creation involve God. Both acts take place all the time — creatio ex nihilo, the creation of the universe out of nothing, involves God continuing to hold all things in being at every instant; and metamorphic creation takes place at every Mass. Both acts, by their very nature, cannot be scientifically proved or disproved. Both acts are believed on the basis of divine authority and both acts make sense of a wide variety of phenomena.

Transubstantiation

In talking of the paradigm of metamorphic creation — of consecration as the transformation of non-living matter into a vehicle of the Divine Life — we are inevitably led to the traditional teaching of Transubstantiation. The paradigm of metamorphic creation can only be understood in the context of the basic insight so powerfully expressed by the concept of Transubstantiation. Recent attempts to describe the Eucharistic Event as Transignification and Transfinalization turn out, in the final analysis, to be reductionistic since they deny the fundamental truth of the actual presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This is not the case with the paradigm of metamorphic creation, which is merely one more way of illustrating the truth of Transubstantiation.

Let us assume for a moment that when Jesus said "This is my body . . . This is my blood," he meant his words to be taken literally. That there is a Change in the bread and the wine during the words of consecration uttered by Christ speaking through the person of his priest has always been accepted among Christians. That the Change involves the true indwelling, the actual Presence of God in what was once bread and wine was also widely, even fervently, professed by the faithful. But accepting the fact of this Change is one thing. It is quite another thing to describe what we mean when we talk of such a Change and try to explain how it is possible for this Change to take place. The famous doctrine of Transubstantiation was introduced precisely in order to clarify and magnify the nature of the Change without pretending to make it any less mysterious.

The essence of the doctrine of Transubstantiation is the following: there are objects independent of us in the world; in any and every object in the world, there is a distinction between the object's properties and qualities and the physical substrate, or substance, in which these properties inhere and that endures over a period of time; the qualities and properties of an object (color, size, etc.) are part of the object but cannot exist independently of its physical substrate (the redness of a brick cannot exist independently of the brick); although more "independent" than its properties, the substrate of any and every object ultimately derives from and is constantly dependent for its continued existence on the creative action of God; God, who has made every object out of nothing and who keeps it in existence as the specific being that it is with its particular substrate and properties, can change a given object into a wholly different kind of being by changing its physical substrate while allowing it to retain the properties of the original being. As applied to the Eucharist, when the bread and the wine are consecrated at Mass, a change of physical substrate or substance, appropriately called "transubstantiation," takes place whereby these now become the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ while still retaining the properties or appearances of bread and wine.

The genius of St. Thomas Aquinas was to locate this transformation within the context of the creative activity of God and each object's existence as a finite participation in God's infinite Act of Being. Only an awareness of the mystery of the entire and constant dependence of each object on God both for its existence and its existence with the kind of physical substrate and properties that it has will prepare our minds for the greater mystery of Transubstantiation.

Ultimately, the description of the whole Event in terms of substance and appearances is not the issue. The truth being taught is that the reality that was bread and wine becomes an entirely different Reality, namely the Body and Blood of the Risen Lord, all the while leaving in place the physical properties of bread and wine. Just as the same reality endures through different appearances in the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, in the case of the Eucharist the same appearances endure through different realities.

The idea of a differentiation between a reality and its appearances is more plausible today since it is generally accepted that there are differentiations even at the level of appearances — for instance between the quantum and the classical realms, between mass and energy, between the virtual environments of cyberspace and the real world, between hardware and software. In taking the creation of life as an analogy of the Change that takes place at Transubstantiation, we might be able to clarify some of the more common misconceptions about this doctrine.

The Paradigm Of Life

Both the origin and nature of life remain as much a mystery today as ever before. Life here is understood as any system that processes energy and information and replicates.¹ We have no conclusive proof — accepted with any degree of consensus by the scientific establishment — concerning the origin of cellular life at the most basic level or of the processes of metabolism and replication that are required to sustain and transmit life. The problem applies just as much to prokaryotic (bacteria, algae) as to eukaryotic cells (plants and animals); the discovery that archaeal cells form a distinct class has been followed by discoveries that reduce the likelihood of there being a linear sequence from archae to eukaryotes.² The magnitude of the problem becomes even more apparent as we ascend the hierarchy of life from mere biological life to the conscious life of animals to the rational, self-conscious life of the human person.

One can evade the problem by asserting that life originated from some process of chemical self-organization that could take place again given appropriate conditions. This is an evasion because we are ignoring the more fundamental questions: where did these chemicals come from and how did they acquire these characteristics of self-organization? Dr. Werner Arber, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work in molecular genetics, rightly noted in Cosmos, Bios, Theos,³ a book I co-edited, that "The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem." In his recent book, What Remains to Be Discovered, John Maddox, former editor of the journal Nature, writes, "We now know when life appeared on Earth's surface, but we do not yet know how it began . . . Mere arithmetic shows that the chance that such a molecule [the simplest of enzyme molecules] will be assembled from its elementary components by random processes is so small as to be virtually zero."⁴ Moreover, all forms of life in matter are guided by the genetic code and the information or meaning-content that constitutes this code is, like all meaning-content, intrinsically immaterial. Exhaustive efforts to map thousands of genes, commendable as they are, in no way answer the question of how, to begin with, such information was inbuilt in matter.

Moving to human life, we are (a) conscious; (b) aware of being conscious; and, (c) just as clearly conscious that our consciousness is dramatically different from anything material or physical. Could consciousness and other fundamental features of the human condition such as images, concepts, intentions and choices —features which we are directly and constantly aware of and aware of as intrinsically immaterial — have arisen from lifeless, purposeless mass-energy given not just a few billion years but an infinite period of time? It seems obvious that we cannot give any credence to the idea that a certain bundle of mass-energy that just happened to exist (without beginning or end) then evolved without any direction or guidance over time into THOUGHT. We cannot seriously believe that intellect sprang out of mindless mass-energy, consciousness out of lifeless matter, intelligence out of blind force fields. In Cosmos, Bios, Theos, Sir John Eccles, a Nobel Prize-winning brain scientist, affirms that "the only certainty we have is that we exist as unique self-conscious beings" and that "the conscious self" is "a divine creation."⁵ Another contributor to the volume, Nobelist Sir Nevill Mott, noted, "There is one 'gap' for which there will never be a scientific explanation, and that is man's consciousness. No scientist in the future, equipped with a supercomputer of the twenty-first century or beyond, will be able to set it to work and show that he is thinking about it."⁶ Once we truly recognize that we are conscious thinking agents, we can never again conceive of our coming to be from anything less than a conscious thinking agent. Only Mind can beget mind; only an infinite Intelligence, an intelligence that has no limitation of any kind, can create beings with any kind of intelligence. I think and therefore know that I cannot as a thinking being have come into existence from non-thinking matter.

The upshot of these reflections is that the existence of any form of life is a profound mystery. But it is a mystery that illuminates a greater mystery yet—the appearance of the Divine Life clothed in the medium of matter. Here a consideration of the hierarchy of life in the world is relevant:

1. Matter

2. Cellular life — incorporates matter

3. Plant life — incorporates matter and cellular life

4. Animal life — incorporates matter, cellular life, some characteristics of plant life and includes perceptual consciousness and communication

5. Human life— incorporates all of the above and includes conceptual thought and communication, free will and the consciousness of the self

6. Angelic life — pure conceptual thought and will

7 The Divine life — the infinite Energy, Goodness, Love that created all other forms of life and holds them in being

Other than the Divine Life Itself — from which flows all other life — and the angelic life, which preceded other created life, the appearance of each one of these kinds of life involved a quantum leap from the previous kind, a leap that is not explicable or comprehensible in terms of physics and chemistry. We know without any shadow of doubt that even given a trillion years a non-living rock cannot suddenly come to life. Nevertheless, in the case of those forms of life that have a material matrix, each higher form incorporates all of the capabilities of the forms below it.

This drama of the manifestation of progressively higher forms of life in the world, which began with the creation of matter out of nothing and continued with the elevation of matter into various forms of life, reaches its climax with a transformation as dramatic as the initial creation out of nothing: namely, the elevation of matter into a vehicle for the highest form of life, the Divine Life that underlies all of creation. This last transformation is what we call metamorphic creation.

To understand the idea of metamorphic creation, we have only to look at life itself. It is surely significant that matter is involved in every instance of the creation of life in this world. Because we are creatures of flesh and blood, we have to touch, see and smell life at all its levels to understand it and work with it. This need is met in the supreme instance of the appearance of a new kind of life in the world: it is a creative act whereby matter is transformed into that which contains the preexisting Life of God while continuing to manifest the characteristics of matter. And just as God works through created agents in the creation of new life, so too in the Metamorphic Creation he works through human agents endowed with the required supernatural authority.

If someone were to ask what there is that is different about the Host before and after consecration, the answer, in a word, is the Life that is now present in it. The Eucharist throbs, pulsates, explodes with the infinite Energy of the Divine Life. But this Energy can be experienced only by the soul because it is literally soul-food. Can we see this Life, it may be asked. The answer is "No" for the simple reason that neither human nor Divine life is something you can see. Human life, of course, manifests itself through various actions such as locomotion, speech and the like. The Divine Life, the Life that creates and transforms, manifests itself in the soul.

Even in our everyday experience, the huge amounts of energy latent in what appears to be the most inert units of matter is hidden to view. The equivalence of mass and energy expressed in Albert Einstein's formula e = mc² tells us that the energy contained in any material object at rest is derived by multiplying its mass m by c², the square of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) — or, as Einstein put it, "The energy that belongs to the mass m is equal to this mass, multiplied by the square of the enormous speed of light — which is to say, a vast amount of energy for every unit of mass." The fact that something is motionless says nothing about whether or not it is actually exploding with energy. Einstein himself noted this paradox: "But if every gram of material contains this tremendous energy, why did it go so long unnoticed? The answer is simple enough: so long as none of the energy is given off externally, it cannot be observed. It is as though a man who is fabulously rich should never spend or give away a cent; no one could tell how rich he was."⁷ The equivalence of mass and energy was confirmed most dramatically (and tragically) by the atom bomb. The relevance, albeit indirect, of the mass-energy equation to the doctrine of the Eucharist is simply this: the physical characteristics of an object rarely reflect its inherent power.

If we wonder how the power and glory of the Divine can be hidden in as humble a vessel as the Host, we must first consider the fact that just 20 pounds of plutonium can blow up an entire city with a destructive force of 70 million pounds of TNT. Even more mysterious is the fact that two and a half pounds of gray matter unveiled the precise mechanism that made this conversion of mass to energy possible. The point of these examples is not to prove the presence of the Divine Life in a tiny sliver of matter but to broaden the horizons of both the intellect and the imagination. We cannot forget that when God became man, he came as one "without beauty, without majesty . . . no looks to attract our eyes; a thing despised and rejected by men" (Isaiah 53:2). It is only to be expected that this humility of appearance would continue as he invites us anew in the mystery of the Eucharist.

In saying that the presence of the Divine Life will be apparent only to the soul, we are not suggesting that the resultant experience is simply a matter of feelings or abstractions. St. Thomas Aquinas notes that the sacrament of the Eucharist has the appearance of food and drink because it does for the soul what bread and wine do for the body: it sustains, builds up, restores. Reception of the Eucharist can shake us to the very foundations of our being, cleanse us in the most profound sense, strengthen character as we confront choices at every instant and give direction and momentum in our daily voyage to the divine. We say can because the explosion cannot take place without the critical mass or a chain reaction. The Energy that is released is, of course, not physical energy but it is the Energy that holds all things in being.

To perceive and receive the Divine Life our hearts must thirst for it, our minds must have at least a dim recognition of who is present and our wills must be at least minimally turned to God and not against him. The Eucharist has no effect on a soul hardened in deadly sin for the same reason that food given to a corpse does not energize it. "Mortal" sin like a "mortal" wound destroys life. But the divine Life that leaves the soul in mortal sin will return to it if there is repentance, reparation and recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation. And each instance of the physical reception of the Eucharist, if accompanied by a receptivity of the soul, replenishes and intensifies the divine Life already present in us.

We have spoken of the Eucharist as the vehicle of Divine Life because it is the Flesh and Blood of him in whom "dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily" (Col. 2:9), namely the Second Person of the Trinity in his human nature. In the case of human beings, there is no physical separation from the presence of the life of a person and the person himself. Thus I am present wherever my life is present. Likewise, every encounter with the Divine Life that is in the Eucharist is simultaneously an encounter with him who possesses that Life, the Risen Christ. It is the presence of Christ in us in his Divine Life that led the Apostle Paul to write, "Yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20).

The new paradigm of the Real Presence outlined here might help clarify features of the doctrine of Transubstantiation that have seemed opaque to some critics. Take the allegation that it is unintelligible to say that appearances can remain the same despite a change of substance. The confusion here can be clarified by a consideration of the appearance and disappearance of life. A physical entity that receives life becomes a different kind of entity from what it was before receiving this life — it is now a living being. Every physical component is now a part of this new being and the being itself is present in its every part. But when it dies, even if there is no change in weight or of components, what was once part of this being becomes mere waste. Once the sparkling eyes close and the heart no longer beats, then the person is no longer present and the body is no longer a body. The parallel to the Eucharist is quite simple. At the creation of the human soul at conception, the particles that were simply bits and pieces of matter become bits and pieces of a person. At consecration, the particles comprising the bread and wine suddenly become particles comprising the Flesh and the Blood of Christ. In the case of human life, when the bits and pieces of matter "give out", the person dies — and what is left of the bits and pieces are no longer a part of a human body. Likewise, when the appearances of bread and wine cease to exist, either through natural corruption or digestion, then the Divine Life is no longer present and the remnants of the vehicle of Divine Life are now merely instances of matter in motion.⁸

In conclusion, we will briefly address a few misconceptions about the Real Presence:

1. Jesus Christ is sacramentally present in the Eucharist in his physical reality but not dimensively and visibly. The appearance of bread and wine was perhaps chosen because it is, on the one hand, unbloody, and, on the other, does not overwhelm as we surely would be overwhelmed if we saw Christ in all his glory.

2. It is true that God — and this means the Trinity — is present everywhere. But God Incarnate, Christ in his human nature, is today present only in heaven and in the Eucharist. At consecration, Christ does not come down from Heaven to the Host but the Host rises to him — the reality that is bread and wine is transformed into a reality that is identical with his Body and Blood.

3. It is the Risen Christ who is present in the Eucharist — and he is present in every particle of the Host, every drop of the Precious Blood.

4. The Eucharist elevates matter to its highest level and it is perhaps a prefiguring of the new heaven and the new earth that is to come.

5. There is no better analogy of complete union than the processes of eating and drinking because what is eaten and drunk becomes a part of the person who eats and drinks. Thus to receive the Eucharist is to bring the Divine Life into one's being in a manner as intimate as the physical act of eating and drinking. The physical reception of the Eucharist is an exact image of the reception of the Divine Life in the Eucharist into one's soul.⁹

Notes

1 George Gaylord Simpson, Science, 1964, 143, 771.

2 W. Ford Doolittle, "Uprooting the Tree of Life," Scientific American, February 2000, 90-5.

3 Werner Arber in Cosmos, Bios, Theos edited by Henry Margenau and Roy Abraham Varghese (Chicago: Open Court, 1992), 142.

4 John Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered (New York: Free Press, 1999).

5 Sir John Eccles in Cosmos, Bios, Theos, 164

6 Sir Nevill Mott in Cosmos, Bios, Theos, 66

7 Albert Einstein in The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics edited by Timothy Ferris (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 58.

8 The relevance of quantum theory may be briefly noted here. Amazing advances have been made in the last century in understanding the fundamental structure of matter. But these advances have been accompanied by an awareness that our ability to describe activities in the microstructure of matter and the laws governing these activities is inherently limited (for instance, the impossibility of simultaneously measuring momentum and position). From the standpoint of the present issue, the distinction drawn in the doctrine of Transubstantiation between a reality and its appearance curiously parallels the debates about the distinction between classical and the quantum descriptions of a physical reality. Transubstantiation, of course, says that the bread and wine change at both a macro and a micro level to the Body and Blood of Christ and so quantum physics sheds no new light on the doctrine. But the quantum debates are relevant to the extent that we cannot confidently claim to know everything there is to know even about the "appearances" (at the subatomic level) of a physical object let alone that which makes it the kind of object that it is (its "substance").

9 Two recent books that are relevant to some of the themes touched on here are to be highly commended for their original and important contributions. The first, What is Life? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), by Professor Josef Seifert, winner of the European Medal of Philosophy, is an incisive critique of reductionist accounts of life. The second is Substance: Its Nature and Existence, by Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz (London: Routledge, 1997), a powerful exposition of the concept of substance in the context of modern science and philosophy. I would like to thank Fr. James T. O'Connor, author of The Hidden Manna, for kindly reviewing the contents of this essay. Finally, I want to note that the primary themes here arose out of a discussion I had with my son Michael. This essay itself is excerpted from my forthcoming book, God-Fleshed!

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Roy Abraham Varghese is the editor of various books on the interface of science, philosophy and religion, including Cosmos, Bios, Theos (Open Court, Chicago), described in Time as "the year's most intriguing book about God " and widely reviewed in technical and popular publications, with contributions from 24 Nobel Prize-winning scientists; Cosmic Beginnings and Human Ends (Open Court, Chicago), winner of a Templeton Book Prize in 7995; Great Thinkers on Great Questions (One World, Oxford and distributed by Penguin); and Theos, Anthropos, Christos (Peter Lang, New York), a volume in the American University Studies in Religion series. His most recent book is God-Sent! A History of the Accredited Apparitions of Mary (Crossroads, New York, 2000).

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