Future Dialogue and Growing Unity

Prospects for future dialogue and growing unity between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church may be aided by further consideration of points of agreement and difference between the two churches. This has certainly been the experience of the 40 year long dialogue between the two churches known as the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC)Footnote ¹. One of the areas where substantial agreement has been reached and concerning which dialogue continues is the nature of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. At the official level, the Anglican Communion through the Lambeth ConferencesFootnote ² and the responses of the ProvincesFootnote ³ has indicated that the ARCIC statements are consonant in substance with the faith of Anglicans and sufficiently express Anglican understanding of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Official responses from the Roman Catholic Church, have however, indicated that certain traditional theological and philosophical interpretations of transubstantiation relating to the substance of the bread and wine being replaced by the substance of Christ's body and blood with the accidents remaining, were obligatory for the acceptance of any ARCIC statement on eucharistic theology by the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁴ Whilst the ARCIC documents did not present such traditional interpretations of transubstantiation, they nonetheless argued that both churches accepted that the real presence of Christ was to be found in the Eucharist, the eucharistic elements and the eucharistic gathering and that the doctrine of transubstantiation in modern Roman Catholic thinking referred to the fact of Christ's presence in the Eucharist rather than a particular technical definition of how Christ was presentFootnote ⁵. The traditional theological and philosophical interpretations of transubstantiation preferred by the official Roman Catholic responses to the ARCIC documents opted for a substance/accidents metaphysic, whereas the ARCIC documents themselves and some other Roman Catholic commentators did not insist on the traditional interpretations of transubstantiationFootnote ⁶.

Anglican eucharistic theology has typically presented a variety of views on the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, based on different philosophical assumptionsFootnote ⁷. The traditional Roman Catholic explanation of transubstantiation based on a substance/accident metaphysic, expressed by Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent and more recently in the Catechism of the Catholic Church Footnote ⁸, has however not been one of these views. Anglican theologians have nonetheless reflected both positively and negatively on transubstantiation in an Anglican context. Some of these views will be examined below as a way of reconsidering transubstantiation in an Anglican context. These views may well be important in any future dialogue between the two churches on the Eucharist in regard to transubstantiation.

Older Anglican Thinking on Transubstantiation and Real Presence

Anglicans have sometimes expressed negative views concerning the doctrine of transubstantiationFootnote ⁹, while at the same time affirming a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The ‘how’ of Christ's presence in the Eucharist expressed by the traditional scholastic doctrine of transubstantiationFootnote ¹⁰has not been central to the thinking of Anglican theologians, even though many affirm the fact of Christ's presence in the Eucharist.

Nicholas Ridley in the debate on the Eucharist in the House of Lords in 1548Footnote ¹¹, rejected transubstantiation, and argued that the bread and wine of the Eucharist remain in their natural substances after consecration. At the same time he argued that Christ's body and blood are present in the Eucharist by grace and power. For Ridley a transformation was involved after the consecration, and he argued that: ‘besides the natural bread there is an operation of Divinity, for my Senses when they taste and eat, perceive but a figure. … In that bread is the communion of the body of Christ in the good. … It is transformed, for of the common bread before, it is made a Divine influence.’.Footnote ¹² Ridley, while denying any change in the natural substance of bread and wine, such as the traditional definition of transubstantiation requires, at the same time argued for a transformation on the basis of Christ's divinity. Ridley when speaking of the Eucharist at Cambridge in 1549 admitted that following consecration ‘by the word of God the thing hath a being that it had not before’ and that ‘there is a mutation of the common bread and wine spiritually into the Lord's bread and wine … but I deny that there is any mutation of the substances’Footnote ¹³. Fleshy realism is excluded and Ridley also distanced himself from transubstantiationFootnote ¹⁴, however the idea that there was a ‘being’ after consecration which was not there before suggested a real change or addition to the elements. As Ridley said: ‘I grant, … the bread to be converted and turned into the flesh of Christ; but not by transubstantiation, but by sacramental converting or turning’Footnote ¹⁵.

Jeremy Taylor argued that it is a mistake to inquire too deeply into the manner of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and that it is better merely to believe that the ‘true body of Christ was present, whether under the consecrated bread or any other way’Footnote ¹⁶. For Taylor, transubstantiation was a problem since it attempted to define the manner of the presence too closely and was unnecessary during almost the first thousand years of the church's history. Taylor's preference was to say that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was ‘real and spiritual’Footnote ¹⁷. By this term ‘spiritual presence, he meant: ‘that it excludes the corporal and natural manner’ and that the spiritual presence ‘is to be understood figuratively, that is, not naturally, but to the purposes and in the manner of the Spirit and spiritual things. … Christ is present spiritually, that is, by effect and blessing; which, in true speaking, is rather the consequent of his presence than the formality.Footnote ¹⁸

Similarly, Lancelot Andrewes in his Response to Cardinal Bellarmine spoke of the reality of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, but was not willing to be drawn on the manner of that presence. He did however reject the doctrine of transubstantiation since he argued witness to it cannot be found in the Scriptures. He also affirmed that the presence of Christ, not the sacrament, was to be worshipped in the Eucharist. He says:

Andrewes did not deny that the elements were changed, but he did deny that there was a change in substance of the elements. Speaking of early authorities he said:

The way in which the change was brought about, argued Andrewes, was through the power of God. Andrewes explained this as follows:

Andrewes argued that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was a kind of hypostatical union between the visible and the invisible, in the same way that the manhood and the Godhead of Christ was united in the incarnation. There was a change in ‘nature’ such that the reality of the sacrament, as Andrewes called it, that is, the nature of Christ, was united to the visible elements and as such they became divine, not in a fleshy manner, but in the manner of sacramental realism.

Bishop John Bramhall denied transubstantiation but affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Regarding transubstantiation he spoke in adversarial disputation with the Roman Catholic de la Milletiere and said:

Bramhall saw transubstantiation as an opinion and one form of sacramental realism but at the same time affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Bramhall's objection, was the notion of a change of substance implied in the specific metaphysics of transubstantiation.

Modern Anglican Thinking Transubstantiation and Real Presence

Transubstantiation has also been discussed by modern Anglican theologians less constrained by the Reformation controversies as those reviewed above. They argue that the word ‘transubstantiation’ itself is not the problem, rather the problem is any theological/philosophical schema which insists on involving a change in substance. Will Spens in discussing the idea of change in the bread and wine of the Eucharist by consecration made the point that such change did not result in a physical presence but rather the addition of new properties by the act of consecration. For Spens there were both the natural properties of bread and wine and the added eucharistic properties, such that the bread and wine became more than they originally were and therefore of more value than before consecration. It was this process that made the symbols effectual signs of Christ's presence. He suggested that the words ‘convaluation’ and ‘transvaluation’ were useful to suggest the change in value brought about by consecration where there were new and more valuable propertiesFootnote ²³. This allowed Spens to say that:

Spens was refiguring the doctrine of transubstantiation in a way linked to the incarnation, such that the substance of Christ's body and blood present in Jesus Christ was the same substance now present in the eucharistic bread and wine, but at the same time he was excluding any idea of a change of substance in the bread and wine. Instead he spoke, in scholastic terms, of additional properties or a transvaluation. Such a view was different, in his view, from the one condemned by the Thirty-Nine Articles Footnote ²⁵ regarding overthrowing the nature of sacrament through the affirmation of a physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and therefore, in Spens’ view, not condemned by the Articles. For Spens the bread and wine remained signs in their own substance but effectual signs in that they conveyed what they signified through the addition of new properties and the changing value of the bread and wine. For Spens this meant that the bread and wine of the Eucharist became ‘a direct expression of our Lord's being and nature’ which ‘enable us not only to participate in the blessings of His sacrifice but to be strengthened with His life, thus affording a relation to Him even more intimate than that which His natural body made possible’Footnote ²⁶.

William Temple developed this idea of ‘value’ further in relation to transubstantiation arguing that the concept of ‘value’ was one of the chief characteristics of realityFootnote ²⁷. Reality, for Temple, included both the spiritual as well as the material, and he argued that the spiritual was no less real than the material simply because it could not be quantified in the same way as material realities could be quantified. For Temple, this means that ‘existence’ and ‘value’ are both substantive, and value is not merely adjectivalFootnote ²⁸. This lead Temple to an examination of ‘Substance’ and he suggested that it might be possible that Substance be used for Real Thing, such that this equation followed:

But, argued Temple, this is too simplistic, since ‘according to one familiar use of the wordFootnote ³⁰, the Substance of a thing is something other than the whole real thing, as, for example, from the Accidents’Footnote ³¹. If this line of thought was followed then:

The equation above could therefore be modified, so that sometimes it read:

This was an important statement for sacramental theology. For Temple, substance in the sacraments could be its Value, without the actuality of experience in the material sense. Substance therefore did not imply a dependence on a theory of substance and accidents, nor did it involve a material or carnal presence, but implied sacramental realism, where Reality was not dependent on a material presence but rather the presence of the divine, instantiated in material objects, such as the nature of Christ, instantiated in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Temple expressed this saying:

Temple described this process as ‘transvaluation’ and claimed that such a ‘theory is the only true transubstantiation’Footnote ³⁵. By speaking of ‘lower grades’ and the indwelling of a ‘fullness’ in them, Temple was adopting a sacramental realist view and this had particular relevance to eucharistic theology. The lower grades (bread and wine) were indwelt by the fullness of Christ and as such were transvalued or transubstantiated in the sense that their substance possessed a new value. Another way of describing this state of affairs would be to say that ‘the accidents are the same; the substance is changed’Footnote ³⁶. By saying this Temple is not arguing for some form of carnal realism such as the equation:

implied, where ‘experience’ meant a material or carnal reality. Rather Temple was arguing for transvaluation and transubstantiation in the sense of the equation:

The first equation involved the carnal realism of direct physical experience and the second implied sacramental realism without the physical experience. It was in the sense of the second equation that the terms transvaluation and transubstantiation were used by Temple in a state of affairs based on sacramental realism. The value attributed to or instantiated in the bread and wine of the Eucharist was the nature of Christ. This presence or instantiation was a reality, but it did not exist in the sense of material experience or carnal presence, nor did it exist in the sense of the substance of the bread and wine being replaced by the substance of Christ, that is, transubstantiation in its traditional interpretation, with the accidents remaining. The form of philosophical reasoning involving a change in substance had little place in modern philosophical thinking and therefore Temple attempted to find a new way of describing the state of affairs which is the Eucharist and which used modern philosophical assumptions.

Temple in continuing his consideration of the eucharistic presence did not imply a solely objective value for eucharistic presence, completely apart from experience, but acknowledged that it did involve a subjective element. Subjective value for Temple was a ‘constituent’Footnote ³⁷of value and ‘Value, in short, is actual in experience’Footnote ³⁸with the objective and the subjective being held together with any division between subject and object being ‘bridged in the very moment of its appearance’Footnote ³⁹. This happened, Temple argued, because ‘in actualised Value subject and object are united on equal terms’Footnote ⁴⁰. This bridging of subject and object involved such theological concepts as ‘spiritual’ and by ‘faith’, since it was by faith that the communicant was aware of the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For Temple, this idea of a real and spiritual presence bridged the gap between object and subject and equated well with what he termed ‘transvaluation’ or ‘transubstantiation’ in the sense in which he defined it. The bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ in the sense that they were indwelt (instantiated) with a higher value (the nature of Christ) and as such were transvalued or transubstantiated without the necessity for any removal of the substance of the elements and their replacement with another substance. Temple affirmed this in the principle ‘that to be a true or an essential symbol, a thing must be itself an individual instance of what it symbolises’Footnote ⁴¹.

Eric Mascall sought to develop the eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas and apply the notion of transubstantiation in an Anglican context. The doctrine of the incarnation was central to his work and he applied the same philosophical scheme to the eucharistic context. Mascall spoke of an ‘organic relation’ between the order of nature and the order of grace, where it was in the order of nature that the order of grace workedFootnote ⁴², such that it was through the bread and wine, as elements of the order of nature, that the body and blood of Christ, that is, the order of grace, were present. Nature, he argued, was perfected not destroyed in this relationship to the degree that the material became the efficacious means of graceFootnote ⁴³. He therefore argued in relation to and in agreement with the eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas, that there was no annihilation of the bread and wine, but rather their conversion. In saying this he nonetheless took issue with any notion of conversion of substance, arguing that any theology of the Eucharist based on a conversion of substance was inadequateFootnote ⁴⁴. He said:

Mascall's position resembled that of Temple in that he argued for an increased ‘value’ of the bread and wine, such that they were transformed or transvalued into an elevated metaphysical state, becoming by sacramental signification the body and blood of Christ. This position of transformation or transubstantiation was not dependent on the taking away of substance and the replacing of it with another higher substance, but rather dependent on a change in value, such that the bread and wine were elevated to a higher value, not in a natural or carnal sense of realism but in the sense of sacramental signification or sacramental realism. Mascall observed that he had no wish to detract from anything Aquinas has said, ‘but in order to complete it and save it from metaphysical absurdity’Footnote ⁴⁶. When Mascall came to ‘ask whether St Thomas's Eucharistic theology is adequate’, he replied, ‘I feel bound to answer No’, not in the sense:

Mascall, like Temple, was not criticising Aquinas or the doctrine of transubstantiation as such, but the version of that doctrine that depended on change of substance at the expense of sacramental signification. The notion of transformation such that the signs have a higher value is the key to understanding what Mascall was arguing. ‘Change’ in the signs did not mean that they were changed in substance, but that they acquired a higher value by transformation, becoming the efficacious symbols of Christ's presence and sacrifice in the Eucharist.

John Macquarrie argued that transubstantiation as a long established doctrine to explain eucharistic presence ‘has much to commend it’ and that ‘it ruled out all magical theories of presence’Footnote ⁴⁸ but that ‘transubstantiation is concerned primarily with a presence understood as presence at a particular time in a particular place’Footnote ⁴⁹ rather than with Christ's personal presence with his people. It was this spatio-temporal emphasis, together with magical and superstitious overtones, that failed to appeal to the Reformers, and it was the whole notion of substance that caused difficulty for modern philosophers who no longer worked with this philosophical category. It was for this reason, Macquarrie argued, that some Roman Catholic theologians have opted for additional means of explaining Christ's presence in the Eucharist. He cited the Dutch theologian Schoonenberg, for example, who speaks of ‘transignification’, which replaces the language of substance and accidents with the language of phenomenology and existentialismFootnote ⁵⁰. Macquarrie, acknowledging his debt to Heidegger, explained this by saying that:

In relation to the Eucharist, there are meanings surrounding the bread and wine giving them significations. Transignification, as Macquarrie explained it, ‘indicates “a change of meaning”, “a shift of meaning”, perhaps even “a new depth of meaning”’Footnote ⁵². The bread and wine were transignified as ‘they receive the meaning of the body and blood of Christ’Footnote ⁵³. Macquarrie rejected the idea that transignification was a subjective receptionist doctrine and argued that Christ:

Macquarrie also considered transubstantiation from the time of the Council of Trent to the present, arguing that ‘transubstantiation has become a word rather than a theory concerning the nature of the change in the eucharist’Footnote ⁵⁵. Transubstantiation has lost its meaning of how the presence of Christ was to be found in the Eucharist and stood instead ‘for the view that there is in the eucharist a real abiding presence of Christ as against any view that denies this’Footnote ⁵⁶. This accords with the footnote in the 1971 Statement Eucharistic Doctrine in The Final Report which argued that in the Roman Catholic Church transubstantiation ‘is seen as affirming the fact of Christ's presence’ and ‘not understood as explaining how the change takes place’Footnote ⁵⁷. What Macquarrie was arguing here was that: ‘any materialistic way of understanding the change or conversion is excluded – as indeed it was by Aquinas – but a real and abiding presence of Christ is asserted as a common belief of Anglicans and Roman Catholics’Footnote ⁵⁸. The common belief was that of sacramental realism.

Macquarrie went on to ask a crucial question. He wondered if: ‘perhaps in terms of modern philosophical thinking, it is possible to think out a theory which will throw some light on the mystery, and do for our day what transubstantiation did for a former age.’Footnote ⁵⁹ This question, he suggested, may well be answered by reference not only to some Anglican theologians, such as Will Spens, William Temple and Eric Mascall, but also by reference to the work of modern Roman Catholic theologians such as Edward SchillebeeckxFootnote ⁶⁰ who speak of the transvaluation and transignification of the meaning of signs based on philosophical reflection not dependent on scholastic notions of substance.

Another modern theologian who works with the doctrine of transubstantiation is Catherine Pickstock. Her work attempts to rediscover premodern themes, such as transubstantiation, making them viable once again, ‘by showing how they were not so trammelled by dogmatic “metaphysics” as both modernists and postmodernists have tended to assume’Footnote ⁶¹. This rediscovery is based on a sacramental realism, with Pickstock arguing that ‘the coincidence of sign and body is most manifest in the event of the Eucharist’, such that, ‘the event of transubstantiation in the Eucharist is the condition of possibility for all human meaning’Footnote ⁶². It is exactly at this point however that Pickstock departed from the more traditional definition of transubstantiation since in speaking of the accidents she said:

This sacramental realism was based on the idea of what she calls non-identical repetition, where although the sign, the bread for example, conveyed the signified, the body of Christ, no recognisable body appears in the bread. The body then and the bread have some discontinuity or non-identical nature in the sacramental realist scheme where the ‘body’ remained a ‘secret’ in that it was not a fleshy realist presence, but a real and divine presence nonetheless. Pickstock expressed this as ‘the contradictory conditions of the beneficent secrecy of every sign (certain/uncertain, continuous/discontinuous, iconic/arbitrary, present/absent)’Footnote ⁶⁴.

The accidents were not secret but the divine power was, in that it cannot be seen directly. As Pickstock said:

Pickstock suggested that there is another, earlier way or ‘logic’ of looking at the Eucharist which lay in a consideration of mystery, where following patristic and indeed Platonic models, signs participate in but do not exhaust the mystery ‘by virtue of a transcendent plenitude which perfectly integrates absence and presence’ such that there ‘is an ontological coincidence of the mystical and the real’ which ‘lies at the heart of medieval Eucharistic theology’Footnote ⁶⁶. In Pickstock's analysis:

Pickstock opted for transubstantiation as the preferred way of describing what happened in the Eucharist. She says:

This state of affairs Pickstock described as a ‘collapsing together of sense and reference’ such that they:

The realism on which this scheme depended is the same as that which functions in the incarnation of Christ as divine and yet human. How can the divine be human? The seemingly sceptical response is resolved in the person of Jesus Christ, just as the sceptical response about how can bread be the body of Christ is resolved in the collapsing together of sense and reference. This is sacramental realism and it depends on the participation of the sign in the signified. It is also the sense in which Pickstock seems to be using the word ‘transubstantiation’, without the substance/accident metaphysic.

For Pickstock, this means that ‘if we say that the real sense and reference of this bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Christ, then since the latter are ultimately mysterious, sense and reference here are only supplied in being simultaneously withheld’Footnote ⁷⁰. This means then that: ‘sense and reference are never discrete’ and ‘instead of the referent being confirmed by our glance towards the bread, it is confirmed by Jesus’ phrase itself [‘This is my body’], uttered with a simple authority which kindles our trust.’Footnote ⁷¹

This leads to the view that ‘God conjoins Himself with the seemingly most base forms of sensory delighting in the form of bread and wine’ where ‘there is a tasting of God through direct physical apprehension, conjoined with a longing for the forever absent’Footnote ⁷². This meant that ‘in the Eucharist, God is only made apparent in a sensual fashion which involves the mediation of all human physical interactions’ where the ‘exaltation of the sensual runs parallel with the glorification of the accidents’ and where ‘it might seem that if bread and wine are reduced from substance to accident, that their natural materiality is thereby degraded’. But ‘God causes the accidents to act as if they were substantive. This means that here the operation of matter in a normal fashion has been rendered miraculous’Footnote ⁷³. It is because they are miraculous ‘that the remaining accidents exceed the contrast of substance and accident’ and ‘are now promoted to a character that most essentially reveals the condition of createdness, and they are accorded the honour of directly subsisting in Being which is the most immediate divine created effect’Footnote ⁷⁴. The partaking of the body and blood of Christ under the species of bread and wine is a means of deification and ‘it becomes not absurd to adore a mere piece of bread’Footnote ⁷⁵. The full significance of this thinking is to be found in the Logos. Pickstock explained this by saying that: ‘The bread and wine which persists as accidents, have become always and essentially food – figurative food which shapes our imitative humanity – and, in this way, they are the appropriate vehicles of the Logos, since like the Logos, they now exist in a pure passage or relationality.’Footnote ⁷⁶. The eucharistic food is not therefore incorporated into our being, but we are incorporated into the food, since the food is the mediation of God.

Pickstock's achievement was to use the notion of transubstantiation in a context which was not dependent on a substance/accident metaphysic such as the traditional interpretation of transubstantiation demanded. Her work argued instead for a coincidence of sign and body in the event of the Eucharist where the sign was taken up into the divine and conjoined with it. Such a form of non-identical repetition did not involve the replacement of one substance with another but rather a fusing or collapsing together of sense and referent or sign and signified such that the sign becomes conjoined with God and thus deified and of a higher value.