“A rite that tramples upon soul and sense,” is what Blake called it.
There was a lot of weed at the Council of Trent that day.
Understanding of the other person’s point of view resolves this debate neatly.
Nonbelievers: Understand that when ‘The substance is changed without changing the accidents’ is said, what is meant, to you, is that ‘The wafer is not changed.’
Believers: Understand that when we say ‘The wafer is not changed.’ we are making a claim only about its accidents.
We’re saying the same damn thing.
Just as an aside, the Catholic Catechism sets as doctrine that in all matters of science, the Church yields to science.
What happens at the Eucharist is not something that “mere” science can’t explain, it just something that science “period” can’t explain. There is not denigration of science.
This is pretty much my question too.
Right, but isn’t there some point where you do enough to the poor dog that it’s not a dog anymore? If you stick the thing in a blender, then dump it in the ocean where sharks eat it, or something?
It just seems like Plato got it backwards. Instead of there being some sort of ideal Form of “Dog”, people see an animal and call it “dog”. Then they see another animal that’s similar enough to the first animal, and it becomes “dog”, as well. This goes on and on, so that by the end, “dogness” comes from all the dogs that ever existed.
I think Plato did mean that the ideal Dog was such an abstraction of human thought, not a cosmic dog of any tangible existence.
Okay, I’m not a very theological Catholic, but I feel like jumping in:
Here’s what I do know about church doctrine – for clarity I will state this all as fact, but of course its a religious belief and not science:
- Everyone is correct, there no physical or chemical change in th bread or wine.
- The “body and blood” is physically Christ. But the molecules are not from the human body that was hung on the cross (by #1), so it is not human tissue with DNA and all that.
- Christ is a member of the Trinity. Or, in non-Catholic terms, he is a supernatural being. So he can be physically present on earth in ways that are mysterious. So, when we say the “body and blood of Christ” were not talking about the same molecules from said body that hung on the cross.
It sounds like everyone has been tossing this around for ages, so I dunno why I think I can clarify anything. But why not jump in? I don’t know anything about Plato, maybe I don’t know as much as I think. Feel free to correct me too
I’m not sure. It seems like transubstantiation isn’t an abstraction of human thought, but rather a representation of the “true” item. Not an physically existing cosmic dog, or a composite of all one’s knowledge about dogs, but some concept of “true dogginess” which is free of any kind of material attributes we’d assign to dogs. Something that, if withdrawn from a four-legged, barking, waggy tail creature would mean that it was not actually a dog.
I don’t think there’s more than a semantic link between the religious rite of transubstantiation and Platonic Idealism, so anything said about one doesn’t imply anything about the other. Plato thought these Platonic Ideals had a higher reality than the physical world, but it’s hard to know what he meant by that… surely not that there was any kind of physical reality to them… it’s been too long since I read it to know if he thought the bricks and mortar of the universe somehow held these ideals, but I’ve always understood it to be a transcendent conceptual kind of reality which is “real” only in a philosophical sense… interesting to reflect upon, important in considering epistemological frameworks and with applications to almost human endeavor, but not “real” in the sense that you can throw a rock at it.
As for transubstantiation, it’s dogma… the stuff is changed because it’s said to have changed. It hasn’t changed on the surface, but it’s changed in some non-material way. Don’t ask questions.
Trying to understand here…
Is it fair to say that, when a person dies, this represents a change in “substance” but not in “accidents”? The dead person has the same physical attributes and is made up of the same materials after death as before, but they’re no longer the same person.
Is the way in which Roman Catholics understand Christ to be present in the bread and wine analogous to the way we understand a person to be present in their body before the moment of death but not after?
No, a dead body is physically different than a live one. The “substance” of a thing is nothing more than the sum of it’s “accidents”.
Well, there are several “accidents” of a person that change at the moment of death. Metabolical activity for one.
Maybe that’s what’s going on at Transubstantiation. An electron that once was part of the physical body of Jesus at the cross hits the wafer and the wafer is now the body of Christ. It is very diluted but it is there. We may not have the tools to spot it but that is our shortcoming, not God’s.
This could explain why all the fuss about dropping the Host. The priest needs to recover every last little piece and eat it all. This to eliminate the risk of loosing that little piece where Jesus’ electron hit it.
Another reasonable explanation is that nothing has changed at all, either in substance or in accident. If I pronounce my daughter an otter “in substance,” there’s not much point in contemplating the transcendental ways she is an otter despite her physical resemblence to a young human. Ochams Razor: there is nothing more than what is necessary. I simply made an untrue (or perhaps meaningless) statement. Mystery solved.
When Jesus first said, “This is my body…Take, eat,” he was still living. Is that to be considered?
Further, when we talk of the body and the blood, the wafer and the wine, in all cases aren’t we talking mostly about a lot of space in between neurons? (Sorry, I’m no scientist.) Is the space different from one to the other?
One of the principle schisms in doctrine among protestant faiths is not whether transubstantion can occur, but whether it was meant to be an ongoing thing. Among other things, it cost Ralph Waldo Emerson his job as a minister.
Things can undergo changes of substance without themselves being physically changed; for example: when my daughter was born, I was physically more or less the same object as the day before, but I had changed into a father; If only two examples of a given kind of object exist (say, rare postage stamps), and one of them is destroyed, the remaining one becomes unique, without physically changing at all.
Neither of these examples is particularly analogous to what is claimed about Transubstantiation (A belief I don’t personally have investment in, in case it appears I am defending it on those grounds), but the point is that the meaning, or purpose of an object - the substance of what that object actually is can indeed change without the object itself physically changing at all.
You mean in between atoms, Zoe (neurons are brain cells, neutrons are parts of atoms), and yes, most matter is empty space. IIRC, however, Platonists would not say that this vacuum is perfused by the entity’s Essential Beingness as some sort of equivalent of the aether, since that would STILL place it in the imperfect, environmentally-variable material world; but rather that it occupies an entirely different plane of existence, in the realm of Ideal Forms, and what we observe in this world are the projections/shadows/reflections or intersections of that plane of existence with our own universe.
Sapo, even having a particle of “Jesusness” hit an electron just so that it jumps one energy state would be a change in “accidents”. And the entirety of the hosts at a consecration do become transubstantiated so that’s quite some bombardment they’d be subjected to 
Thudlow, no, IIRC transubstantiation makes the host/wine itself become part of the Body/Blood of Christ in its substantia/ouision/“essential beingness”, not that it becomes possessed by the soul of Christ.
Many Christians that believe in the Real Presence would rather take the angle that if the point is that the communicant partakes of the transcendent/metaphysical Body of Christ, then it is within the power of the Holy Spirit to just make that happen by whatever means, without having to have the whole thing become tied up in an Aristotelian/Neoplatonic logical cluster***k trying to justify it to themselves in rational terms. (That “Body of Christ” thing is itself another whole can of worms, since Jesus is supposed to be simultaneously both fully normally human, though having undergone the Resurrection the physical matter of his human body has attained a special, transformed state, AND fully divine, still a full-time homeostasis of the indivisible triune God. )
But that isn’t really a change in the object, but a change in the brains of humans, and/or a change it’s relationships with other objects. Well, OK, you changed, but that’s because you are the human brain in question.