THE REAL PRESENCE by Tom Elich

I am in the train on my way home from the hospital. I have just said a last goodbye to my dear grandma who is dying. My eyes and heart are filled with tears, my mind with memories going back to childhood. My shoulder presses against the large person sitting beside me. There is conversation around me but I do not notice. When I get off and walk home, I cannot say if I was sitting beside a man or woman or anyone. Who has been really present to me during my journey?

Real presence is ambiguous. Yet in faith we hold firmly to the real presence of Christ in the liturgy: Christ who is with us in the assembly of the Church, Christ who speaks to us in the words of Scripture, Christ who leads us in the person of the priest, Christ whom we receive as bread and wine from the table of the Eucharist.

How do we understand real presence? What does it mean when Jesus holds bread and says, ‘This is my body’; then gives the cup and says, ‘This is the cup of my blood’?

Historical Tension

Let us pay a visit to the monastery of Corbie in the ninth century. Two of the monks, contemporaries, had very different approaches. Paschasius Radbertus had a literalist understanding. For him, the eucharistic body of Christ was virtually the same as the historical body, born of the Virgin Mary, only it was veiled by the bread and wine which were like a mask or an envelope to conceal the natural body of Christ. He supported his position with crude stories of bleeding hosts or the vision of the infant Jesus sacrificed on the altar. God is kind to us. Because we cannot bear to eat raw human flesh, God transforms the body of Christ into bread and wine for communion.

His confrère, Ratramnus, also affirmed the real presence of Christ but offered a different understanding. He advocated a sacramental reality, not a literal one. The elements of bread and wine do not contain or veil the natural flesh and blood of Christ. Externally, the Eucharist retains the form, the smell and taste of bread and wine; internally, there is something far more precious: a divine reality perceived by the mind of faith, received and eaten by the faithful. The Eucharist is spiritual food, not carnal sustenance. Citing Augustine, the sacrament for Ratramnus points both to the body of the risen Christ and also to the ecclesial body, the Church.

Paschasius was very wary of the distinction between ‘image’ and ‘truth’ because he thought it might compromise the reality of Christ’s presence; Ratramnus on the other hand affirmed it as essential to a proper understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist – it is the sacrament of the true flesh of Christ. In the eleventh century, teacher Berengarius of Tours was charged with heresy and made to confess that the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are not merely a sacrament after consecration, but are rather the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that these are truly, physically and not merely sacramentally touched and broken by the hands of the priests and crushed by the teeth of the faithful. Clearly he was teaching a sacramentalist position but was forced to adopt this ultra-literalist one. Ultimately the sacramentalist view wins the day in terms of official theology, but the literalist view has been remarkably persistent in the popular imagination until the present day.

Two examples will suffice. In the eighteenth century, Mozart composed an exquisite setting of a fourteenth century text Ave Verum Corpus which we still love to listen to. It was written as a salutation of the blessed sacrament at its elevation; it displays a clearly literalist understanding of real presence. Hail, true body, born of the Virgin Mary, having truly suffered, sacrificed on the cross… In 2020, a young Italian, Carlo Acutis, was beatified. He died of leukaemia in 2006 at the age of fifteen after spending his final months documenting and cataloguing eucharistic miracles for his website. There are hundreds of them from every part of the world since the Middle Ages, mostly referring to the host which appears as human flesh.

Transubstantiation

The official Catholic position affirmed at the time of the Reformation is enshrined in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually a firmly sacramental presentation of the Eucharist. The word was first used officially at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and then elaborated by Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century. It means that the accidents of bread and wine remain unchanged, but the substance of bread and wine are changed by the words of Christ into the substance of his body and blood.

The problem for us is that we no longer understand reality in this way. ‘Substance’ has nothing to do with a scientific or forensic understanding of matter. It is a metaphysical reality. Take a book, for example. It is made of paper, plastic, ink, glue and so on. But all this, including its colour, smell, weight and size belong to its ‘accidents’. Absolutely everything that can be accessed, even by the most sophisticated science, belongs to its ‘accidents’. Taking them altogether, this thing is a book. It is an object that shares bookness with millions of other objects on library shelves. This bookness is its ‘substance’. So when we talk about transubstantiation, what we are saying is that nothing changes about the bread and wine at their consecration except ‘what-it-is’. It is no longer bread and wine; it is the body and blood of Christ. We can only know this by faith.

This is not really the explanation of the Eucharist that some people imagine it to be. It is unique and utterly mysterious that the accidents of bread and wine can be detached from their substance and instead adhere to a different substance. The accidents of the body and blood of Christ have no connection whatever to the Eucharist. This makes the eucharistic miracles of bleeding hosts or the appearance of Christ highly problematic. These are the work of the mystical imagination but are not part of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Nor in fact can we imagine that Christ is in the host, or in the ciborium, or in the tabernacle. ‘Locality’ belongs to the accidents of an object, not its substance. Thus the substance of bookness is not trapped inside any particular book; it is meta-physical, that is, it transcends the physical object. The risen Christ, present in word and sacrament, in the assembly of the baptised and its leader, is not contained by any of them. When we pray at the tabernacle or before the monstrance, we behold the sacrament which takes us through to a different reality.

A Sacramental Reality

Sometimes people are dismissive of a sacramental, non-literalist understanding of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. There may be a fear that the ‘real’ is being downplayed in favour of something which is merely ‘symbolic’. But this is to misunderstand the structure of the sacramental reality.

For Aquinas, a sacrament has three inter-related dimensions, none of which can be disregarded:  Sacramentum – the sacrament itself, which is the bread and wine.  Res – the ultimate reality or purpose, which is our unity as the Mystical Body of Christ.  Sacramentum et res – the intermediate or bridging sacramental reality, which is the Body and Blood of Christ.

Thus the sacramental sign of the bread and wine is not irrelevant; rather it is the means by which we participate in Christ who is present sacramentally, the way to union with God. The ‘signifying’ and the ‘reality’ are two sides of the one coin. This is what we mean when we speak of the sacraments as efficacious instruments of God’s grace. So the liturgy encourages us to make the signs well – to have real bread that we can break into many parts, to receive communion from the cup – so that our sacrament not only effects what it signifies, but also signifies what it effects. When the sacramental sign breaks down – when the bread and wine are no longer something edible and potable – the consecrated elements are no longer the body and blood of Christ.

Acceptance of the sacramental nature of Christ’s real presence liberates us from scruples. Dust from the consecrated bread which adheres to the ciborium, a stain on the purifier from the consecrated wine are not really bread and wine. They are not for eating or drinking. (Remember, the notion of ‘substance’ is metaphysical, not forensic.) If the sacramentum is not there, nor is the sacramentum et res.

We are also liberated from the duty of trying to police who is entitled to receive holy communion. One of the neat questions which medieval theologians asked is, Quid mus summit? If a mouse were to nibble at the consecrated bread, what would the mouse be eating? Their answers were many and varied. But we would say that animals and infidels who approach the sacrament can only engage at the level of the sacramentum. It requires faith to seek union with God (res) and to participate in the blessed sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord. It requires faith to take and eat, take and drink as a memorial of the Risen Lord. It is only by faith that the sacrament can be fruitful.

The focus on the sacramental reality helps us to move beyond narrow concerns with validity and to embrace questions of fruitfulness. It gives us a way to compensate for the limitations of Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of transubstantiation. His focus on how to make a valid sacrament had no way to put the consecration into its full liturgical context. The liturgy served only to solemnise the act of consecration.

We can now place Jesus’ words of institution into the setting of the whole Eucharistic Prayer which offers God praise and thanksgiving and allows us to enter into the memorial of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We can now place the Eucharistic Prayer into the setting of the whole Liturgy of the Eucharist in which we receive communion from the altar as the highpoint of our participation. We can now place the Liturgy of the Eucharist into relationship with the Liturgy of the Word in which we encounter the risen Christ who speaks to us in the proclamation of the holy Scriptures. We can now place the action of the Mass – liturgy of word and sacrament – into the centre of the action of the whole Church which we recognise as the Body of Christ. To imagine that Christ is really present just in the consecrated elements (and is even contained by them) is a terribly reductive and impoverished understanding.

A Final Image

A husband on his wedding anniversary goes to buy a red rose for his wife. He chooses one and brings it to her as a gift. From a materialistic point of view, it is exactly the same as the dozens of other roses in the bucket at the florist shop. From a sacramental point of view, it is an entirely different object. What happens next is crucial. Whether the wife puts the rose in a vase or in the bin reveals, not what she thinks of flowers, but her response to her husband’s love. The flower has become a symbol, a sacrament one might say. Nothing about the rose has changed; yet everything has.

Rev Dr Tom Elich is Director of Liturgy Brisbane. Used with permission from Dr Elich and from Liturgy Magzine, Auckland Diocese