Nourishing Mystery

The Eucharist in Modern Philosophy
by xavier tilliette, translated by jonathan martin ciraulo
catholic university of america, 200 pages, $34.95

This book, by the late Jesuit theologian Xavier Tilliette, discusses how philosophers from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries—including Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Fichte, and Hegel, as well as a number of minor figures—engaged with the doctrine of the Eucharist. It needs to be said that the book is difficult: very French in its style, written in the expectation that the reader can handle a good deal of untranslated Latin and will have extensive prior familiarity with the philosophical tradition. Even the patient reader who has that familiarity will find it hard to discern clear formulations of many of the positions under discussion or direct arguments for Tilliette’s conclusions. For some, however, the book will be worth the effort, especially for the way it brings to light a surprising and generally unappreciated strain in the history of Western philosophical thought.

Tilliette’s narrative begins with René Descartes, who, in the Objections and Replies appended to his Meditations on First Philosophy, considers two sets of questions concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation. In medieval scholasticism, that doctrine was formulated in terms of the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident: Though the consecrated host was substantially the body of Christ, the accidental qualities of the original bread and wine remained. Descartes, having rejected Aristotelianism in favor of a strictly mathematical conception of material nature, proposes in his Replies that the continuing appearance of bread and wine results from the identity of the surface of the divine body with that of the elements it replaces. Here, the “surface” is the, as it were, outward-facing part of a material thing, which affects our sensory organs and so gives rise to a perception of it. Different things with identical surfaces—like an ordinary object and a lifelike sculpture of it, for example—can give rise to the same perceptions. As Descartes puts it, “a given surface must always act and be acted upon in the same way, even though the substance that was beneath it has changed.”

This position could not be sustained. It was central to Descartes’s physics that material substances are distinguished only by the different ways they are extended through space. Of course, in a complex substance like bread or wine there will be any number of distinct ingredients or chemical components, each with its own way of being extended. But this raises the question: How can the bread and wine be said to have been replaced with something substantially different if the extension, and therefore the surface, remains entirely unchanged? The commitments of Cartesian physics rule out the possibility of a strictly invisible difference between two kinds of material substance, for the nature of such a substance consists only in the way it is shaped, and any difference in its shape must make some sort of difference in the way a substance appears, or would appear under close enough inspection.

Tilliette finds an acknowledgment of this difficulty in some of Descartes’s correspondence, where Descartes modifies his earlier position by drawing an analogy with the way the human soul “informs” the body and so makes its elements into parts of a living human being. Descartes proposes that, in a similar way, the words of consecration bring the soul of Christ to inform the consecrated elements such that it “remains supernaturally attached to each one of them.” Yet this is Cartesian dualism at its most ludicrous. It presupposes a conception of soul and body as so totally distinct that an immaterial principle could be said to “inform” absolutely anything, given the appropriate exercise of divine power. Further, it is hard to say how, on this position, what remains after consecration is not still a piece of bread—albeit one with a divine soul somehow attached to it.

Given his influence on the history of modern thought, it is easy to blame Descartes for the mess that follows. Would this be fair? Here are two reasons why it would not. First, as Tilliette’s narrative helps to show, there is no doubt that Descartes was motivated by a sincere desire to reconcile Catholic teaching with what he took to be the demands of scientific physics. This was precisely the project of the Meditations: to explain how God’s existence, and the real distinction between the soul and the body, could be demonstrated from the very principles that also supported Descartes’s anti-Aristotelian physics. He meant, in other words, to show how the Church did not need to tie itself to an otherwise insupportable metaphysics in order to sustain its most important doctrines.

Second, by the time Descartes encountered late scholastic Aristotelianism in the universities, that tradition had hardened into an elaborate, highly speculative philosophical system that is a funhouse-mirror distortion of its original, which for Aristotle was just an account of our ordinary, pre-philosophical thinking about what is. (Robert Pasnau describes some of the relevant history, including how much it had to do with debates over transubstantiation, in his chapter “Real Accidents,” in Metaphysical Themes, 1274–1671.) For example, whereas Aristotle illustrated the category of substance with mundane, perceptible things like Socrates and this horse, John Locke, writing just half a century after Descartes, defined “substance” as the “unknown support in which qualities are supposed to inhere.” Such degenerations of Aristotle’s thought probably deserved to be rejected and definitely shouldn’t have been taken on as presuppositions of Catholic doctrine. Even if he contributed to our present confusion, Descartes was hardly its originator.

Alongside Descartes and Maurice Blondel, the philosopher whose work receives the most attention in Tilliette’s book is G. W. Leibniz. Though Leibniz was a Protestant throughout his life, he was frequently concerned to articulate philosophical and theological doctrines in ways that would minimize or even eliminate the differences between Catholic and Protestant teachings. (For more on this history, presented with greater clarity than in Tilliette, see Robert Merrihew Adams, “Leibniz’s Examination of the Christian Religion” in Faith and Philosophy.) His discussions of transubstantiation, which are mostly contained in exchanges of letters between Leibniz and his contemporaries, are written in this spirit. Leibniz tries to explain to his Catholic interlocutors how “your transubstantiation” can be understood within his philosophical system—though seeming to take seriously the importance of showing this to be possible, as if his system had to be able to accommodate this doctrine in order for it to be a sound one. The light it sheds on this little bit of history is a good example of what makes Tilliette’s book so interesting. He depicts Leibniz as “the informal peacemaker, the expert in compromise, who thinks he has found the way to diffuse [sic] the disputation between Catholics and Protestants, three centuries before the ecumenical conversations at Les Dombes”—the Swiss and French organization whose document “Toward a Common Eucharistic Faith?” was released in 1972.

The discussion of Leibniz’s writings on the Eucharist is, unfortunately, one of the most difficult parts of this difficult book. Some of that difficulty is the fault of Leibniz himself, whose metaphysical system of monads—roughly, simple substances with their own inner subjectivity, which Leibniz took to constitute the absolute reality lying behind corporeal phenomena—is among the most intricate and perplexing systems of ideas in the history of Western metaphysics. But it’s also the fault of Tilliette and his frustratingly indirect style. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that Leibniz’s notion of a vinculum substantiale, or “substantial bond” uniting numerous monads into a single substance, which he introduces as a way to explain the possibility of transubstantiation, is central to the work of Blondel, whose work Tilliette treats at length, and very favorably, in a later chapter. The obscurity in the earlier chapter carries over to the later one, making it ever harder to understand what is being considered.

In his short concluding chapter, Tilliette advises moving beyond what he calls the “Eucharistic physics” that is “crudely posed” in philosophers such as Leibniz and Descartes, and rejecting the “excessive scholastic subtlety” that leads to an obsession with the various “problems” of eucharistic doctrine rather than an understanding of the “act of communion” that treats “the sacred bread as a vehicle of spiritual nourishment.” It is indeed important to take this wider context. As G. E. M. Anscombe explained in her great essay “On Transubstantiation,” the central mystery of the Eucharist is not that of Christ’s coming to be in the church where one is, but that of his presence on the altar, as a sacrificial meal that we are to eat and be nourished by. To understand this, one must begin not with metaphysical distinctions but rather with the salvation narrative: the stories of Abraham and Passover, the significance of animal sacrifice in ancient religions, the fulfillment of God’s covenant in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. Stripped of this context, talk of “transubstantiation” or “real presence” loses its meaning; it becomes little more than a divine parlor trick, an idle doctrine that’s a more than occasional source of perplexity—as when a child I knew, who was told by his mother to quiet down in church since Jesus was in the tabernacle, asked in response whether Jesus was a midget. What’s needed here is not a better ontology, but a renewed understanding of the kind of event that the Holy Mass is.

Yes—but the claim of eucharistic presence is a physical claim. Not because it is a claim that could be tested by, or stated in the terms of, anything we today would call “physics,” but because it is a claim about what is there in the sanctuary: no longer bread and wine, but the body of Jesus, sacrificed for our sake and given to us to eat. (There is nothing in this that Tilliette would disagree with.) If that is the teaching, then philosophy must have something to say about it, not because there is any need to explain how this happens in a way that would make it seem more probable or less mysterious, but in order to clear away various obstacles to accepting the teaching, by showing it to be neither contradictory nor a description of what is simply impossible. Taken to excess, this inquiry may become a self-contained academic enterprise that may be contrary to the spirit of simple devotion. Done rightly, it can be a devotional act of a kind.

John Schwenkler is professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois.

Image by PickPik, public domain. Image cropped.