Some scientific ideas may
help clarify what the Church believes
about the Holy Eucharist

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

1. Jesus not only has the Divine Life but IS the Divine Life incarnate
2. our eternal life depends on our living with his Divine Life
3. 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.”

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

1. conscious;
2. aware of being conscious
3. just as clearly conscious that our consciousness is dramatically different from anything material or physical.

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