What is substance?.

[o_mlly]

Is anyone interested in exploring this with me? We hear of terms like "consubstantial" in the creed and 'transubstantiation" as in a Catholic explanation of the sacrament. But what does it all really mean?

If we recognize a thing to be a mystery then we recognize that thing as simultaneously unexplained.

The Greek word mysterion was translated into Latin by two terms: mysterium and sacramentum. In later usage the term sacramentum emphasizes the visible sign of the hidden reality of salvation which was indicated by the term mysterium.

The mysterium emphasized the various unknown elements thought to make up existing forms of matter, or a substance seen as an elemental or pure form of something else. As such mysterium is an abstraction, a concept of the mind, that identifies the form of the object. Matter individuates that concept into the particulars all of which possess the same form. Substantial, literally to stand firmly under, is akin to essence. Transubstantiation mean to change the essence of a thing. How does that happen? And we're back to mysterium.

I favor combining the reflections of John Chrysostom, St. Augustine and, soon to be Blessed, Archbishop Fulton Sheen. At Eucharist, we experience a moment in eternity: Christ's sacrifice, once and for all, is made present.

In reflecting on the Cana miracle, Chrysostom and Augustine note that in eternity the water is wine as all moments, past and future, in eternity are present. Sheen reflects on how in the natural order, the hierarchy of living things transforms the lower into higher forms in order that the lower might share life more abundantly. In the Eucharist, the bread and wine that the living Christ consumed, and in consuming transformed them into Himself, is made present to us as His body, blood, soul and divinity for us to consume that we might have life everlasting.

John Chrysostom (Homily 22 on John's Gospel) says,"But now to show that it is He who transmutes water in the vine plants, and who converts the rain by its passage through the root into wine, He effected that in a moment at the wedding which in the plant is long in doing."

In De Trinitate, Augustine says that miracles are the acceleration of events that occur in nature over time. Significantly, he begins his explanation by saying that God draws the rainwater through the roots to the branches of the vine and makes wine. Christ's changing of the water into wine at Cana is the same process done with "unusual speed" (De Trin. III, 5).


And Fulton J. Sheen, (Life of Christ) reflects on the Last Supper:

Everything in nature has to have communion in order to live; and through it what is lower is transformed into what is higher: chemical into plants, plants into animals, animals into man. And man? Should he not be elevated through communion with Him Who “came down” from heaven to make man a partaker of the Divine nature? …

When Our Lord, after He changed the bread and wine to His Body and Blood, told His Apostles to eat and drink, He was doing for the soul of man what food and drink do for the body. Unless the plants sacrifice themselves to being plucked up from the roots, they cannot nourish or commune with man. The sacrifice of what is lowest must precede communion with what is higher. First His death was mystically represented; then communion followed. The lower is transformed into the higher; chemicals into plants; plants into animals; chemicals, plants, and animals into man; and man into Christ by communion. Animals have life more abundantly than plants; man has life more abundantly than animals. He said that He came to give a life beyond the human. As the oxygen could not live the more abundant life of the plant, unless the plant came down to it, so neither could man share Divine Life unless Our Lord came down to give it.