The Eucharist

[Nate]

Recent polls have shown that many Catholics do not really believe that the Eucharist is the true body and blood of Jesus.
This is not so surprising given the poor catechesis and instruction given by the church in our times. According to this doctrine, during the consecration at Mass, the substance of the bread and wine is changed into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ, while the accidents (physical appearances) of bread and wine remain.

The word “substance” used in the explanation of what occurs has different meanings in scholastic philosophy and modern physics, and few Catholics are students of Scholastic philosophy. Unlike its philosophical meaning meaning , in physics a substance is totally defined by its observable properties or accidents. To someone not aware of these differences the catechism definition sounds like gibberish.

My own approach to trying to grasp the meaning of this mystery is to contemplate the mathematical nature of physical reality. When as a young student of complex numbers I had a teacher who was fascinated by a subsection of that subject called conformal mapping. Using binomial transformations of coordinates from one space to another we could change the shapes of any patterns to something quite different in the transformed space. Circles could become squares or triangles and vice versa in the other space. Some of these transformations, like the Schwarz-Christoffel transform, preserve the character of other equations such as electrical potential in both spaces, and are two dimensional tensors. In my ignorance I wondered what was the real shape of the fields since they looked different in each space, while being the solutions to the exact same equation. Of course all the shapes and fields are real even though you might call them different names depending on which space you were referring to, but their essence as solutions to the same equation was identical.

Dirac a father of quantum physics claimed it was useless to think of an electron in any way but as a solution to mathematical equations. But mathematics itself is not physical. That is I cannot buy or describe a pound ,or meter or an hour, of mathematics or logic or theorems. The latter terms are spiritual things like intelligence, love, justice etc.
So reality is not just determined by material dimensions of space force and time but has spiritual dimensions. And if we knew how to quantify them all (good luck with that) we might be able to construct a tensor that would enable some understanding of the real presence of Christs body in the Eucharist. My understanding of the words of consecration are a short hand symbol for invoking activation of such a tensor by God.

[CCF_Bob]

The Eucharist cannot be explained or understood by science. It is an act of faith, a gift from God. If we truly love and trust God, we accept his words.
John 6: 66 As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.

[Bruce]

I believe that the key to explaining the Eucharist to modern people is to first explain teleology, the idea that everything has a telos, a final end or purpose. Things are not just what we decide they are in the moment (à la Kant), but are something in an objective sense. God's point of view of the world, if you will. An acorn is not an acorn just because we say that it is an acorn, but because it was created to be such, and its natural end is to become an oak tree.

God, as the One who maintains all things in existence and brings all things to their natural ends, is the One who says that the bread is now His Body, and the wine is now His Blood. Because He orders everything and assigns everything a purpose, then if He says that this is so, then it is so, not by some magic trick or twisting of the natural order, but within the natural order of which He is the Master.

Anyway... that's a poor, two-paragraph explanation of how I tend to approach this topic. I tend to avoid "substance" and "accidents" because it "takes too long to get there from here".

[jtum1]

The Eucharist cannot be explained or understood by science. It is an act of faith, a gift from God. If we truly love and trust God, we accept his words.
John 6: 66 As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.

I agree. Though a geologist by education and trade, I find that the divine, is not best understood by the rational intellect, but by the heart. It would be good to challenge, exercise, the heart. I remember one priest, one or two decades ago challenge the flock by saying, if you don't believe in the real presence, why are you here (at mass)? Why bother? Etc.

[jtum1]

P.s. regarding the Real Presence, I believe I heard it as the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord. Then there is st Augustine, 'received what you are, become what you receive.'
https://www.usccb.org/eucharist#:~:t...he%20Eucharist.

https://www.earlychurchtexts.com/pub..._eucharist.htm

[LethalMouse]

The concept of science vs magic is an atheist concept.

Do we think when God created the universe He did it and said "whoa, how did that happen?"

Or do you think every aspect of it was known and literally understood?

Science means "to know". Anything unknown is arguably "not science" but that's only in the eye of the beholder. Eventually one "could" come "to know" anything and that thing would qualify as science.

If I came from a race of magical elves and we had the magical ability to teleport... someone, could someday know how. Thus, it would now magically be "science"???

Neither preclude the other. Magic is not real, because Magic as it's now understood means no one, not even God, knows it.

God knows. At the least. If not many more. Angels, Saints, Mystics, some random guy.

There are many mechanisms and concepts by which the host can literally scientifically be Jesus's body. The question similar to the word games of science vs magic, comes in when you define a thing out of existence.

For instance the modern definition of miracle makes miracles not exist. "That which is impossible happening." Yet, nothing that happens can be impossible, no matter how implausible.

Meaning by fiat humans have declared the divine be gone.

What IS a body? Is it fat? Muscle? Is it bone? Is it the myraids of microbiome that is intrinsic to our ability to exist as a total being?

It's interesting, in forensics when a human is dropped in the ground, the ground literally becomes the human body. See, after the corpse is placed there, all the soil microbes are replaced by human microbiome, human requisite microbiome.

Interestingly some who reject eucharistic miracles claim it's microbes that cause the blood test and appearance. The problem is, some microbes are 100% a person's body, as is a pancreas cell that does cell things.

Interestingly, the only people who can do the whole transubstantiation thing have an unbroken chain of literal touch back to Jesus... the touch being quite requisite.

When bread enters my body, at some point it IS my body. When my cells are not on my body for some period they still are my body.

Covid practices were a blasphemy