“THE MYSTERIES”—THE EUCHARIST (part I)

Homily given by Fr. Dennis Koliński, SJC

St. Peter’s Church, Volo

6 April 2008

In the year 390, St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, wrote two works, which he used as a series of catechetical teachings on the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist for catechumens. The first work, called De sacramentis, “On the Sacraments,” was a series of discourses he delivered to the catechumens prior to Easter as they prepared to receive these Christian Mysteries. The second series of discourses, De mysteriis, or “On the Mysteries,” he delivered to them after Easter, after they had already entered into “The Mysteries” through baptism.

The titles of both of these works refer to the sacraments, but as you noticed, Ambrose made use of two different words. In ancient times, the Latin word sacramentum originally denoted an oath of loyalty that soldiers swore to the emperor. Then, around the year 200,the ecclesiastical writer Tertullian applied it to what we now know as “the sacraments” because, just as the soldiers adhered to their earthly lord by an oath, the sacraments are means by which we adhere to our heavenly Lord. But the word Christians first used to denote the sacraments was the Greek word mysterion—“mystery”—because they are above all supernatural mysteries. And it is because of this that most of the early Christian writings refer to the sacraments simply as “The Mysteries”.

You may not be newly baptized catechumens but in this post-Easter season, I’d like to present to you, much as St. Ambrose did, a series of discourses on the Mysteries, and in particular on the greatest of “The Mysteries,” the Most Holy Eucharist.

In his discourses, De mysteriis, St. Ambrose said that the Eucharist is “that food which you receive, that living Bread which came down from heaven.” It “furnishes the substance of eternal life … it is the Body of Christ.”[1] But he poses the question: “I see something else, how is it that you assert that I receive the Body of Christ?”[2] And he goes on to show “that this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated, and the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because by blessing nature itself is changed.”[3] This “blessing”, by which “nature itself is changed,” spoken of by Ambrose in the fourth century, we call today the consecration, and the change it affects we call “transubstantiation.”

But how does one describe or explain a mystery so sublime that it is beyond our capacities of human reason? For this, we must look to Aristotle, one of the greatest minds the world has ever known. And we can only wonder at how in God’s plan, a pagan who lived several centuries before the coming of Christ, gave us the concepts that we would need hundreds of years later to explain the mystery of the Eucharist.\

In examining the world around him, Aristotle determined that all things that exist have what he called substance and accidents. The substance of a thing is what it really is. It is the reality of the thing that exists in and of itself; something that exists in its own right without needing anything else to define it—such as a rock, a tree and a horse. In discussing the concepts of substance and accidents my old philosophy professor, Fr. Leo Sweeney, liked to talk about dogs. He would say that there may be many different kinds of dogs but the substance, the essence of any dog, is its “doginess.”

But in addition every created substance also possesses what Aristotle called “accidents,” not pile-ups of cars on the road, but rather a word he used to define the things that are not essential for its being, or shall we say, things that are accidental to the existence of a given substance. Man is a substance. But a man’s size, age, appearance, knowledge, hair color and so forth, do not exist in and of themselves, but only as accidental qualities that help define a specific man.

So, let’s go back to Fr. Sweeney. He would tell us that the substance of all dogs is “doginess,” but some are big and some are small, some are brown and some are black, some are longhaired and some are shorthaired. But in the end they are all dogs. Their substance, then, is “doginess,” whereas the accidents that define them as specific kinds of dogs are their size, color, length of hair, etc. Substance, therefore, is something that exists in its own right, whereas the accidents of color or size must exist in something. They cannot exist independently.

So how does this help us understand the mystery of the Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation? Just like any other physical reality in creation, bread and wine have both substance and accidents. The substance of bread is bread, whereas its accidents are its taste, color, aroma, texture, etc. The substance of wine is wine and its accidents are also its taste, color, aroma, etc.. But when the priest pronounces the words of consecration over the bread and wine, a mysterious unexplainable thing happens. The accidents remain but the substance changes. Although it may still look and taste like bread and wine, its substance, what it really is, is no longer bread and wine. Instead, it is Christ, whole and entire, Body and Blood, soul and divinity. And part of this mystery is that the accidents do not define the qualities of the substance, as in all other objects in reality. Christ is substantially present in the Host but its external qualities do not define His bodily nature, which is present in it.

It was the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century that officially enshrined the term “transubstantiation” to denote this dogma of the substantial change of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ during the Mass, but it was a word used at least as early as the eleventh century. Some, however, have claimed that by using the word transubstantiation it made up a new doctrine. But confronted with the Protestant heresies of the sixteenth century the word itself was nothing more than a means to more precisely and definitively define a doctrine that the Church had held from its beginnings. One of these heresies, for instance, was the teaching of Luther called “consubstantiation,” which holds that the substance of Christ’s Body and Blood exist together with the substances of bread and wine—i.e., the Eucharist is both Christ’s body and bread. A rather strange concept, isn’t it? And people, such as Luther, who think that they are smarter than the Church, can be found all the way down to our present day. For instance, we have those, who now think that Christ isn’t substantially present in the Eucharist at all. For them, it’s just a symbol. And perhaps, that’s what wayward Jesuit Karl Rahner meant when he called what happens at the consecration “transignification”—not a transfer in substance, just a transfer of the significance of bread.

This is why every Catholic should know the word “transubstantiation” and its meaning. For, if more of them cared to know about this crucial teaching of the Church, then perhaps we wouldn’t have 70 percent of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence.

Although we cannot find the word “transubstantiation” in any of the early documents of the Church, this does not mean that Christians haven’t always believed this teaching. There is abundant evidence for this in the writings of the early Church Fathers, but they were dealing with a great mystery, which cannot be easily reduced to words. So, in their attempts to transmit this profound doctrine of our faith to those they were teaching, they conveyed it in the best manner they could. That is why they simply called it “The Mysteries.”

St. Ambrose expressed it in this manner: “What are we to say of that divine consecration where the very words of the Lord and Savior operate? For that sacrament which you receive is made what it is by the word of Christ. But if the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature of the elements? You read concerning the making of the whole world: ‘He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created.’ Shall not the word of Christ, which was able to make out of nothing that which was not, be able to change things, which already are into what they were not? For it is not less to give a new nature to things than to change them.”[4]

As Catholics we have become very accustomed to the Eucharist. But perhaps, we need to recapture that way of thinking of the early Christians, who looked upon it with awe and called it “The Mysteries.”