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ABSTRACT
The doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist presents a particular challenge to its defenders: how is it so much as intelligible? This paper explores Dummett’s response to this question, centred on the notion of deeming. Whilst instructive, Dummett’s position is unsustainable as it stands, since it fails to secure the meaningfulness of the doctrine. Once deeming is brought together with an account of bodiliness and an appreciation of the nature of the Eucharist as a meal, however, the way is open to demonstrating the intelligibility of the doctrine. This is a prerequisite even for its rejection as false.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Michael Bench-Capon, Tasia Scrutton, Carrie Thompson, and Mark Wynn for discussions of versions of this paper and to three anonymous referees for the present journal for useful comments.
Notes
1. The Investigations terminology ‘form of life’ does not occur in the lectures, but is consonant with the view taken there (Wit09). I do not think that anything said in the Lectures entails the form of relativism subsequently called ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’. See here the discussions in (NP05).
2. Of course it may be in a particular case that the doctrine in question just is insane or incomprehensible. The point is simply that we shouldn’t assume this to be so because it appears to be from the outside.
3. My own view is that God could do no such thing, since there is no intelligible state of affairs consisting in a human body and blood being disguised as bread and wine. Nevertheless, it is a view that has been held of the Eucharist, and boasts amongst its merits securing the robust (worldly, correspondence…) truth of ‘this is not bread’.
4. In the broad sense of ‘logical’, whereby, for example, it is a logical problem of how we can legitimately say of something that looks like bread that it is the Body of Christ.
5. A note on usage: I use ‘Real Presence’ to designate the doctrine that after the consecration, it is false to say that the Host is bread, and true to say that it is the Body of Christ (and mutatis mutandi for the wine). I use ‘transubstantiation’ to designate Aquinas’ explication of this in the Summa Theologiae.
6. Which Frege took to be identical with that of the corresponding imperative and interrogative sentence, these differing in force from the declarative.
7. See, e.g. (Dum75). For a good overview of Dummett’s philosophy of language, see (Wei02).
8. For an overview of Aquinas’ metaphysics of the material world, including a discussion of transubstantiation, see (Bro14), but see below for doubt about the claim that Aquinas is a revisionary metaphysician.
9. This more practical orientation arises from the influence of Wittgenstein. For Wittgensteinian approaches to the Eucharist, see (Ker99), and for another example, Anscombe’s essay on transubstantiation (Ans74). On practice orientation in philosophy of religion, see (SH18).
10. There are continuities here with Dummett’s sometimes association of realism with theism, about which I have voiced concern elsewhere (Hew18). Note, however, that those concerns were rooted in the suggestion that God qua God can decide certain questions. Here, however, it is God qua human being, in Christ, to whom appeal is made, and my objections have no force.
11. In Arcadi’s classification, then, I’m looking to explicate a Roman transubstantiation view (Arc16, 403). I disagree with Arcadi’s claim that Dummett does not defend this kind of view. I think this issues from an expectation that the Roman transubstantiation theorist must be committed to a robust ‘metaphysical’ transformation, of the sort Dummett rejects in his paper. But this makes doctrine too much hostage to metaphysics (what if ‘robust’ metaphysics just isn’t possible?). Dummett has it that ‘this is bread’ is false and ‘this is the Body of Christ’ is true. This seems to me to capture what is intelligible regarding claims about substance, on which see below.
12. Compare (Guz74, 71); note though that a deeming-based approach calls into question the absoluteness of the distinction Guzie draws between approaches to the Eucharist that ask ‘what is it?’ and those that ask ‘what do we do with it?’.
13. ‘When we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’.
14. These aspects are expressed well in the text often attributed to Aquinas: ‘O sacred banquet! in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.’
Note that the Latin convivium makes the shared aspect of the meal more prominent than the English translation ‘banquet’.
15. On McCabe as a philosopher of religion, see (Hew17).
16. Of course there are plenty of situations in which it is perfectly intelligible that what was once bread is no longer bread, namely those involving (in Aristotelian terms) ordinary substantial change – bread becomes mould, or is digested, or is baked into a bread and butter pudding. Eucharistic change, however, is not supposed to be of this sort (see STh III, q75, a3).
17. The emphasis on the concept body here might cause readers to worry about whether the reasoning of this section can be transferred to the case of belief in the transformation of wine into Christ’s Blood. Here, it is important to emphasise the Catholic understanding, taught by the Council of Trent, in which the whole Christ is present (‘body, blood, soul, and divinity’) under either species alone. The presence of Christ in the chalice, then, is just as much a matter of his body being present – which is, after all, the only way a human being can be present – as is the presence of Christ in the Host. Thanks to Michael Bench-Capon for pressing this point in discussion.
18. I am extremely uninterested in the kind of quasi-scholasticism that worries about the invocation of the Resurrection here on the basis that it calls into question whether the Last Supper was a Eucharist. Quite apart from moving the emphasis away from where it belongs, namely Eucharistic practice here and now, this line of questioning invariably seems to ignore two obvious answers: (a) the Last Supper was not a Eucharist, but included a command to celebrate the Eucharist (this line can be missed owing to the representationalist temptation to parse ‘this is my Body’ as a metaphysical assertion rather than, for example, a performative); (b) the Last Supper was a Eucharist, in which the Risen Christ, not subject to the usual temporal bounds, became present.
19. Which is not to say that it was not once bread. Compare Aquinas’ defence of transubstantiation against an annihilationist approach in STh III,q75, a4. It seems to me important for the religious significance of the Eucharistic rite (particularly the offertory) that our food is genuinely made into eschatological food, not simply replaced by it.
20. Why ‘life and belief’ rather than simply ‘life’? I think that religious belief apart from religious practice is a philosopher’s abstraction, but this apart it seems to me, nobody is going to be brought to the point where the question of Eucharistic presence forces itself upon them apart from actual encounters with the Eucharist. Here, belief in other Christian doctrines can break down barriers to their accepting the Eucharist as what the liturgy claims it to be. But belief in those doctrines in turn seems integrally tied up with practical matters: isn’t faith in the resurrection at least as much a matter of assent to the continuing presence of Christ with the community of faith as of, say, a positive evaluation of the resurrection narratives? c.f. Wittgenstein, ‘It is love that believes the resurrection’ (Wit80, 33e). Of course, Catholic tradition would want to assert the role of prevenient grace in these matters. I would simply add that any satisfactory elucidation of what talking of such grace involves will focus on the lived practice and experience of the faithful.
21. Isn’t this nominalism? No. It is to take at face value ordinary claims to the effect that, say, there are colours (after all there is the colour of that table of there), and to refuse to admit more recondite questions about whether there are really tables. There is an affinity here with ‘easy’ approaches to ontology (Tho15).*.
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Simon Hewitt
Dr SimonHewitt works on both logic and the philosophy of religion. In the latter area, his work focuses on the implications for philosophy of religion of fundamental questions in the theory of meaning. He is particularly concerned to make the twentieth-century movement known as ‘grammatical thomism’, better known within analytic philosophy of religion, and to appeal to it on behalf of a reorientation towards attention to religious practice.