I’m with Müller: the Eucharist

Arcabas5

The Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has a new head – Gerhard Müller, the former archbishop of Regensburg in Germany and he is being severely criticized by various ‘traditionalist’ groups. The accusation is heresy (a pretty tricky label to pin on the Church’s Chief Doctrinal Officer), principally on three counts: denying the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, denying the virgin birth and falsely proclaiming Church unity where it isn’t there. From everything I have read by Archbishop Müller, I have a very positive impression, also for his saying the following:

“Faith is characterized by the greatest openness. It is a personal relationship with God, which has within it all the treasures of wisdom. Because of this our finite reason is always in movement toward the infinite God. We can always learn something anew and understand with ever greater profundity the richness of Revelation. We will never be able to exhaust it.”

To me this sounds exactly like the right attitude and what I have read by his accusers just seems to reveal their insecurity and their sense of feeling threatened by his freedom and lightness of approach. So, what I will try to share in the coming days is my understanding of the three counts on which he is being charged with heresy and I’ll start with the most important one by far – the Eucharist.

Before giving some thought to what Müller said, I would like to come clean about the fact that I treasure and love the Eucharist and also that I believe in Jesus’ real presence there – in it being Jesus! (More on what ’real’ and ‘being’ means later, plus I hope my agnostic and atheist friends are not put off by my coming out like this and that they will bear with me for a couple of paragraphs 🙂

If you take Jesus seriously (and I do), you can’t not take to heart when he says: “Take it; this is my body.” (Mark, 14:22) as he passes bread round to his disciples and next “This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.” (Mark, 14:24) when he does the same with wine. This is a very strange thing to say and definitely one that would have grabbed your attention had you been sat there with the apostles! What it means to me, and what it has meant to many over the last two thousand years, is that Jesus has left his followers a great gift – a way for them to have a relationship with him like that of the apostles. When I receive the Eucharist, or even when I walk past a church anywhere in the world, I thank him for his presence there and I both derive strength from it and take it as an opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to following him with all my strengths and weaknesses.

OK, lets turn to Müller now and see what he actually said, that earned him such ferocious criticism:1

“In reality, body and blood of Christ do not mean the material components of Jesus the human during his lifetime or of his risen bodily existence. Here, body and blood refer much more to the presence of Christ in the sign of bread and wine.”

The way I read it is as follows: bread and wine don’t materially turn into the bodily parts of Jesus (i.e., there isn’t a restructuring of matter from predominantly carbohydrates to predominantly proteins) during transubstantiation. Instead, bread and wine acquire Jesus’ real presence while phenomenologically remaining only its signs. In other words, I see bread and wine while I believe that the priest’s acting on Jesus’ behalf when repeating his words from the Last Supper brings about Jesus’ presence. My affirmation of the Eucharist really being Jesus is an act of faith and is in no way compromised by stating that the bread and wine have not altered in a way accessible to the senses.

So, while the above attempt at unpacking Müller’s statement merely transposes it into my words and exposes that I fully agree with him, let’s take a look at whether it sounds like what the Church teaches:

“[B]y the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1376)

In essence, Müller changes nothing in how St. Thomas Aquinas puts that the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist “cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone” (Summa Theologica, III, 75, 1), but for the sticklers there remains the question of what the Catechism means by ‘substance.‘ Here we have to refer back to Aristotle, whose theory of being it employs and where a distinction is made between a thing-in-itself (the substance) and its properties (which can be accidental or essential). Loosely put (for to do anything else would take us way off track), the substance of something is that which is inaccessible about it to the senses, while its properties are what is. This distinction between the sense-accessible and sense-inaccessible is echoed throughout the history of ontology and there are certainly other, more recent ways of thinking and talking about it than Aristotle’s ones. In Müller’s defense, it is plenty to realize though that his ’presence’ refers to ‘substance‘ while his labeling bread and wine as ‘signs’ refers to their ‘properties.’

Finally, it is worth remembering though that the above sophistication of thought is merely an attempt at being formal and structured about something that is ‘technically’ unknown and that fully relies on faith.

1 Note that the quote is my own translation, as opposed to the following, Googlified one, bandied around on English websites: “In reality, the body and blood of Christ do not mean the material components of the human person of Jesus during his lifetime or in his transfigured corporality. Here, body and blood mean the presence of Christ in the signs of the medium of bread and wine.” For the German speakers among you, here is what he said directly: „In Wirklichkeit bedeuten Leib und Blut Christi nicht die materiellen Bestandteile des Menschen Jesus während seiner Lebenszeit oder in der verklärten Leiblichkeit. Leib und Blut bedeuten hier vielmehr Gegenwart Christi im Zeichen des Mediums von Brot und Wein.“ quoted from „Die Messe.: Quelle christlichen Lebens“, Augsburg, S. 139f.

James, the firestarter

The apostle James, whose feast it is today, is a super popular saint and is widely believed to have been a bit of a hot-head among Jesus’ disciples (likely also leading to his early martyrdom). On one occasion, when some Samaritans didn’t welcome Jesus with open arms, he asked: “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” (Luke, 9:54). Needless to say, he and his brother John, who was in on the plot to bring in aerial support, got swiftly told off by Jesus and they moved on to the next town.

Muddy road

Muddy road
And now for something not all that different: my favorite Zen kōan:

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection. “Come on, girl” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?” “I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”

Mujū

For more great kōans see this collection.

Sunrise skirmish

Two men who wanted to see the sunrise would be foolish to argue about the place where it will appear and their means of looking at it, then to let their argument degenerate into a quarrel, from that to come to blows and in the heat of the conflict to gouge out each other’s eyes. There would no longer be any question then of contemplating the dawn …

Let us who wish to contemplate God purify our hearts by faith and heal them by means of peace; for the effort we make to love one another is already a gift from him to whom we raise our eyes.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
(quoted in Roots of Christian Mysticism)

The God of Explanations

God of explanations

Not to be confused either with the God of Small Things or the God of Rain, the God of Explanations1 is fast running out of business. At the dawn of civilization he was busy with lifting the sun across the sky, with making fire, with curing the possessed; by the middle of the 20th century he only had to flip the switch of creation and now we can even notionalize a self–creating Universe and affirm that the God of Explanations is “not necessary,” “surplus to requirement.” And I totally agree! [but apologize for the sarcasm :)]

Leaving to one side the awkward question of where the laws that govern such a self-creating existence come from and that a “[complete unified] theory [that explains our universe] itself would determine the outcome of our search for it!” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History Of Time“), I would like to argue that applying criteria of “necessity” and “explanatory goodness” to God is a category mistake. It is akin to a child saying that their mother is not necessary for explaining breast milk – true, but not very much to the point …

An atheist has no need for God in their world view – a huge amount of what is going on can be explained by science and some cannot, but is firmly believed to be scientifically explainable. This is a self-consistent view, which rightly looks at God as an unnecessary bolt-on. Someone like me, who believes in the existence of a loving, personal God, can take the same science though and can also split phenomena into explainable and as yet unexplained and, just like my atheist friends, hope for a future increase of the former and decrease of the latter. Neither do I have to equate the unexplained with God’s actions and view the former as having been wrestled off God by science (à la the “God of gaps” argument). On the contrary! I see science as telling me how it is that God’s creation works and I marvel at the beauty of the Standard Model, evolution, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, to mention a few. I also derive pleasure from looking at the history of science, with its drive towards greater understanding peppered with herculean paradigm shifts and all the good that its advances have have done and “to [which] humanity owes so much of its current development” (Fides et Ratio, 106).

Instead of coming to a conclusion that science and belief in God end up being irreconcilable (like Christof Koch does in his interesting “confessions”), I would like to say that a greater understanding of science and a science that has greater and greater predictive and explanatory powers leads to a fuller and greatly enriched understanding of God.

Finally, it is worth realizing that this view is nothing new, as already St. Paul says that “[e]ver since the creation of the world, [God’s] invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.” (Romans 1:20) and in the 1960s the Second Vatican Council affirmed that “if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God” (Gaudium et Spes, 36).

1 I would like to thank my bestie, Margaret, for coining this phrase and for reminding me that “all holy people reject that kind of a God.” 🙂

Imbalance

As is a grain of sand weighed against a large amount of gold, so, in God, is the demand for equitable judgement weighed against his compassion. As a handful of sand in the boundless ocean, so are the sins of the flesh in comparison with God’s providence and mercy. As a copious spring could not be stopped up with a handful of dust, so the Creator’s compassion cannot be conquered by the wickedness of creatures.

Isaac of Niniveh (7th century)
(quoted in Roots of Christian Mysticism)

Who is a Christian?

What is

“Christ is the first-born of God, his Logos, in whom all people share. That is what we have learned and what we bear witness to … All who have lived in accordance with the Logos are Christians, even if they have been reckoned atheists, as amongst the Greeks Socrates, Heraclitus and the like.”

Justin (died 165) (quoted in Roots of Christian Mysticism)

Just to preempt a misinterpretation of the above, I don’t believe the idea is akin to the dubious posthumous baptisms practiced by some groups – instead it is an acknowledgement of the universality of Jesus’ message and a recognition by Justin (Christians) of its practicing and adherence to by others. It is not an imposed labeling of ‘good’ atheists as Christians against their will but an affirmation that being Jesus’ follower is about following his words (feeding the hungry, quenching their thirst, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting prisoners, … (Matthew 25:31-46)). In many ways St. Justin’s statement is echoed in Pope Benedict’s point made during the homily at Freiburg airport last October:

“[A]gnostics, who are constantly exercised by the question of God, those who long for a pure heart but suffer on account of our[, the Church’s,] sin, are closer to the Kingdom of God than believers whose life of faith is “routine” and who regard the Church merely as an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith.”

Pope Benedict XVI