In the last few days the bloggers at Pontifications have posted a few theological excerpts on the topic of Transubstantiation.
I like this, by Sergei Bulgakov:
The bread and wine completely and wholly, without any limitations, become the salvific body and blood. It is, however, precisely the bread and wine that are transmuted, that is, not the qualityless, abstract matter of this world (”earth”), which does not even exist, but a specific type of this matter with qualities, namely bread and wine, which, as materials of this world, do not change but now belong not to themselves and not to this world but to Christ’s glorified, spiritual body.
I think what he's saying here is that at the consecration Christ takes up into his body the qualities of this specific bread and wine: that the Body of Christ becomes larger, taking it in.
The whole problematic of the theory of transsubstantiatio... flows ... from the difficulty of explaining the transformation of one material into another material within the limits of cosmic being. But no transformation at all occurs... for only different things of one and the same natural world, not things that belong to different realms of being, can be transformed. Things that belong to different realms of being can only be transmuted the one into the other, while preserving their own mode of being in their own realm.
I'm not really sure what the distinction is between "transformed" and "transmuted." I think he's saying that there's no way an earthly chunk of bread can change in form to the supernatural body of Christ (that would be "transform"), but that it can change in reality or essential quality (that is, "transmute.") Hmm.
Bulgakov refers the Latinate word "transmute" to the Greek synonym metabole while he explores this concept. It's a neat choice, because he goes on to refer to metabolism in a very direct way:
The fact that the body and blood in their earthly nature remain what they were has no significance here. As such, they have become other than themselves; they no longer have independent existence as things of this world but belong to the body of Jesus, in the same way that the bread and fish that He ate in the presence of His disciples belong to His body. The Lord, who in His spiritual and glorified body abides at the right hand of God the Father, creates, in the transmutation, a body for Himself from the bread, matter of this world, and animates it with His blood.
I think this is a nifty way of grappling with the mystery.
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