Reality is strange

The doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation and transubstantiation initially seem contradictory. Elaborate theological/philosophical accounts of the doctrines are available (e.g., from St. Thomas Aquinas), and given these, there is no overt contradiction. But the doctrines still seem very strange and they feel like they border on contradiction, with the accounts that remove contradiction sometimes looking like they are ad hoc designed to remove the contradiction from the doctrine. This may seem like a good reason to reject the doctrines.

But to reject the doctrines for this reason alone would be mistaken. For similar points can be made about Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics. To say that simultaneity is relative or that a physical object has no position but rather a probability distribution over positions borders on contradiction, and the philosophical moves needed to defend these seem ad hoc designed to save the theories. If we’ve learned one thing from physics in the 20th century, it is that the true physics of the world is very strange indeed.

Nor are theology and science the only places where things are strange. Similar things can be said about the mathematics of infinity, or even just common sense claims such as that there is change (think of Zeno’s paradoxes) or that material objects persist over time (think of the Ship of Theseus and the paradoxes of material composition).

We can, thus, be very confident that created reality is very strange indeed. And hence, shouldn’t we expect similar strangeness—indeed, mystery—in the Creator and his relationship to us?

Change in transubstantiation

The two main parts of the doctrine of transubstantiation that get philosophically discussed are that after consecration we have:

• Real Presence: Christ's body and blood is really there.
• Real Absence: bread and wine is no longer there.

But there may be another part: that the bread and wine change into the body and blood rather than simply being replaced by the body and blood. Certainly the Council of Trent uses the language of "conversion" of bread and bread wine, but it is not completely clear to me that they mean to define there to be something more than replacement. Aquinas talks unclearly (to me) of the substantial change as a kind of "order" in the two substances.

Besides the general puzzle of how change differs from replacement, there are at least two philosophical difficulties about the change. The first is that on some versions--not mine--of Aristotelian metaphysics, what makes substantial change be a change is the persistence of matter. But there is no matter persisting here (indeed, Aquinas' remark emphasizes this). The second is that what the bread and wine change into, namely Christ's body, is already there. But it seems that if x changes into y, then y doesn't exist prior to the change.

Leibniz considers a theory on which the bread and wine change into new parts of Christ's body. This solves the second problem, but at the expense of having to say that the bread changes into a mere part of Christ's body, which does not appear to be what the Church means. Trent does say that whole Christ comes to be present. I suppose one could have a hybrid theory on which the bread and wine change into new parts of Christ's body, and the rest of Christ's body then additionally comes to be present, but not by conversion. While I do not have decisive textual evidence, this does not seem to me to be what Trent means. And it is grotesque to think that Christ gets fatter at transubstantiation.

While it could well be that the Council doesn't mean anything beefy about the "conversion", and perhaps all it is an "order" between the two substances (cf. Aquinas), an order constituted by by non-coincidental replacement in the same location. That would simplify things metaphysically. But I want to try for something metaphysically thicker.

Here's the thought. On my Aristotelian metaphysics, nothing persists in substantial change. But when a change of substance x into substance y, a rather special causal power is triggered in x, the causal power of giving rise to y while perishing. The exercise of such a causal power is what makes it be the case that x has changed into y. There isn't any matter persisting in the change, so the first of the two philosophical problems with the Eucharistic change disappears. What about the second? Here's my suggestion. Normally, the existence of Christ's body at later times is caused by its existence at earlier times. But what if we say that the bread miraculously gets a special causal power, the power of causing Christ's body to exist just as the bread perishes? Then the existence of Christ's body after consecration will be causally overdetermined by two things: the bread's exercising that causal power and Christ's body exercising its ordinary causal power to make itself persist.

The bread in perishing is an overdetermining cause of the existence of Christ's body, and that is exactly how substantial change happens on my view. The main metaphysical difference here is that normally substantial change is not overdetermined, while here it is.

Of balloons and transubstantiation

Our three-dimensional space is curved, say, like the surface of a balloon--except that the surface of a balloon is two-dimensional while space is three-dimensional.

Now imagine you have an inflated balloon. Draw two circles, an inch in diameter, on opposite sides, one red and one blue. Put your left thumb in the middle of the red circle and your right thumb in the middle of the blue circle. Press the thumbs towards each other, until they meet, with two layers of rubber between them. The balloon now looks kind of like a donut, but with no hole all the way through. Imagine now that you press so hard that the two layers of rubber between your thumbs coalesce into a single layer of rubber.

Now the single layer of rubber between your thumbs is at the center of the red circle and at the center of the blue circle. We can think of each circle as defining a place, and the coalesced rubber inside it is found in both of these places.

Replace the red circle with a drawing of a church and the blue circle with a drawing of heaven. The same coalesced layer of rubber is both inside (a drawing of) a church and inside (a drawing of) heaven. Suppose now that the rubber is infinitely thin, and that there is a space that coincides with this rubber, and little two-dimensional people, animals, plants and other objects inhabiting this space, much as in Abbott’s novel Flatland . Suppose that the pictures of the church and heaven are replaced with two-dimensional realities. Then the space of the church and the space of heaven literally overlap, so that there is a place that is located in both. An object found in that place will be literally and physically located both in the church and in heaven. In one sense, that object is physically located in two places at once. In another sense, it is located in a single place, but that single place is simultaneously located both in heaven and in the church.

There is no serious additional conceptual difficulty in three-dimensional space curving in on itself similarly.

(This is largely taken from a forthcoming piece by Beckwith and Pruss.)

Christianity and paradox

Suppose we have a religion whose central tenets are paradoxical, verging on the contradictory. What would we expect? We might predict that the religion would be unsuccessful. But that would be too quick. The religion could be successful by adopting strategies like the following:

1. Hiding the central tenets from the bulk of the members.
2. Obscuring the paradoxical nature of the central tenets from the bulk of the members.
3. Downplaying the central tenets as unimportant.
4. Appealing almost only to the uneducated and ignorant.
5. Denigrating reason, and thus appealing to anti-intellectual impulses among uneducated and anti-rational impulses among the educated.

But now consider Christianity. It has central paradoxical doctrines, including Trinity, Incarnation and Real Presence. It does not hide them from the members. Nor is there any attempt to hide the paradoxical nature of these doctrines: that paradoxicality is plain to see, and if anything it is gloried in. Through much of the history of Christianity, the central tenets have been insisted on very publicly and are central to the liturgy. While Christianity has always had a special love for the downtrodden, its appeal has always also included many men and women of very high intellectual stature. Finally, while there are occasional instances of Christians denigrating reasons in history, the main thread of Christianity has been a defender of the importance of reason, even to the point of a significant part of the tradition embracing the Greek idea of humans as distinctively rational animals. How did it do it? Well, in addition to the five strategies above (and perhaps some others) there is also a sixth possibility:

6. Having true central tenets and having God work in the hearts and minds of members and nonmembers.

Eternalism and accidents without a subject

A classic objection to transubstatiation, famously pressed by Wycliffe, is that according to the Catholic understanding of the doctrine, the accidents of bread and wine persist even though the substance of bread and wine no longer exists. But in Aristotelian metaphysics, accidents are essentially dependent on their substance.

Eternalism—the view that past and future and present things all exist—provides a neat way for the Catholic to respond to Wycliffe. One can, if one so wishes, hold on to the idea that it is metaphysically necessary that a subject exists if an accident exists. But one denies that it is metaphysically necessary that the subject exists at the same time as the accident. The eternalist then holds that even if the bread and wine have perished at a time t₁ after transubstantation, nonetheless it is true at t₁ that the bread and wine exist, where the "exist" is tenseless. On this view, every accident has a subject in the same world but not always at the same time.

Impanation

The doctrine of transubstantiation has two primary components:

• The real presence of Christ's body and blood
• The real absence of bread and wine.

Some objections center on the Real Absence. After all, it looks like bread and wine are present—why would God make our senses deceitful? And why would God destroy the bread and wine? Doesn't nature build on grace? (Quick answers: Senses give prima facie reasons to believe, but in the context of the liturgy as a whole there is no deceit as it is explicitly stated that this is Christ's body and blood. And we are built out of our food, even though our food is destroyed when we eat it.)

One theory that attempts to avoid the Real Absence is impanation. Analogously to how Christ became a human, he now becomes bread and wine. But here is a curious fact about impanation. While it does hold that bread and wine exist after consecration, it has to say that the bread and wine cease to exist after consecration. In other words, the particular piece of bread and the particular sample of wine that were present before consecration cease to exist given consecration, and what we have after consecration is a new piece of bread and a new sample of wine. But if this is right, then impanation really doesn't help much with the two objections to Real Absence. We still have cessation of the existence of bread and wine. And while our sense that bread and wine are present is not mistaken, our sense that it's the same bread and wine as before consecration is mistaken. So impanation doesn't offer much of an advantage with respect to the objections.

But am I right? Does impanation imply that the old bread and wine are absent after consecration? I think so. First, consider the analogy with the Incarnation. The thought was that just as Christ came to be a human being, so too Christ came to be bread and wine. But the human being that Christ came to be did not preexist the incarnation. By analogy, the bread and wine that Christ came to be should not preexist the impanation.

Second, let's call the post-impanation bread B, and the pre-impanation bread A. Then B is Christ (just as the post-incarnation human, Jesus, is Christ). But identity is transitive. So if B is Christ, and A is identical with B, then A is Christ. Which is absurd. So the impanationist needs to deny that A is B.

But perhaps my arguments are a misunderstanding of impanation. For maybe the impanationist doesn't say that Christ becomes bread in the same way that Christ becomes human, but that Christ becomes bread in the same way that Christ becomes flesh. When Christ becomes flesh, there isn't a piece of flesh that is Christ. Rather, Christ comes to be a composite of flesh and soul. Now the analogy between impanation and incarnation forces the idea that there be a Y such that Christ comes to be a composite of bread and Y, analogously to his coming to be a composite of flesh and soul. But it is far from clear what Y would be.

Of oranges and the Eucharist

I had, almost word-for-word, the following conversation with each of my two older children (ages 11 and 8), while I was pointing at something in a baby book.

Me: What's that?
Kid: An orange
Me: Is it an orange or a picture of an orange?
Kid: A picture of an orange.
Me: So it is an orange?
Kid: No.

The two kids then resolved the apparent contradiction in their statements in two ways. The elder said it was a matter of "context". (I think she also thinks that that's the way to resolve the conflict between the fact that tables and chairs aren't in the correct ontology and the obvious appropriateness of saying that there are chairs in the dining area.) The younger said: "Nobody expects you to say 'Picture of'", thereby opting for the move that his answer was elliptical.

Anyway, the reason I had the conversation with the kids is that I had been thinking about Harriet Baber's "Eucharist as Icon" piece, according to which after consecration "That's Christ" simply works through a social institution of a "rule for reference" just as "That's an orange" when pointing at the picture in the book does. (This may be similar to what's implicit in my elder child's invocation of context.) If Baber's view is right, then if we were to point at the host and ask: "Is that Christ or an icon of Christ?", the right answer would be "An icon of Christ."

Now, perhaps, the disjunctive formulation of the question might be seen to present a false dilemma. But we have ways of answering questions like that. "Is Elizabeth the Queen of England or the head of the Church of England?" — "Both." But "Both" would be the wrong answer to "Is it an orange or a picture of an orange?" And likewise, if Baber's view of the real presence as constituted by a pointing convention were correct, "Both" would be the wrong answer to "Is it Christ or an icon of Christ?" But surely "Both" is exactly the right answer that thoughtful Christians through the ages would give.

Of course, as Baber notes well, to Christians, especially in the East, an icon isn't just a picture. Thus to say that the Eucharist is an icon of Christ isn't saying little. But we can say more: it is Christ and an icon of Christ. And if we have the doctrine of the transubstantiation, then we can even say how both parts fit together. The Eucharist is Christ by virtue of substance and an icon of Christ by virtue of appearances ("species"). And that is how it should be: it is appearance, and not the substantial constitution of the substratum, that is crucial to making an icon an icon. The nourishingness of the bread, which persists after consecration, makes the Eucharist stand for Christ on whom we are spiritually nourished; the lack of leaven in the West depicts Christ's sinlessness; the use of leaven in the East depicts the union of the human and divine in Christ; and there no doubt is much more to it than that. All that Baber says about iconography is there in the Eucharist, but there is something more beyond that: the Eucharist is a living icon, like Ezekiel's shaving his beard and Hosea's marrying Gomer, except that in Eucharist not only is the icon alive, but what it represents is its own living reality.

May we so live and receive.