The angelic doctor

 

Over the course of the last 10 months and as part of the Bread for the Journey blog series I have drawn on St Thomas Aquinas on many occasions [for example in The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist #1]. The feast of this great saint occurs on 28 January and deserves a short blog in its own right today. Much of our theological thinking has been shaped by his work especially in regards to the Eucharist.

The saint was a 13^th Century Italian Dominican friar, priest, theologian and philosopher.  He is associated with a school of thought often referred to as ‘Thomism’.  A proponent of natural theology, he argued that the existence of God could be known through rational reflection on the created world, drawing on both human reason and insights from Aristotelian philosophy. He also emphasised that faith and reason ultimately complement one another since both have their source in God.

His best known work is the unfinished Summa Theologica, or Summa Theologiae (1265–1274), which is a comprehensive guide to the theology of the Catholic Church. His work also includes an exposition on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist as well as the composition of many Eucharistic hymns like ‘Pange Lingua’ and ‘Tantum Ergo’, and his personal devotion to the Eucharist.

A fully systematic philosophical explanation of how the bread and wine taken and consecrated in the Mass become the Body and Blood of Christ does not emerge until the second millennium.  While Christians had always professed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a fully systematic philosophical explanation of eucharistic change emerged only gradually in the medieval period.
The context in the 13^th Century and earlier was, apparently, an overly literal and superstitious interpretations of eucharistic change which St Thomas opposed. Some claimed that Jesus’s body replaced the bread in a measurable and biological way or that Christ was ‘cut up’ or multiplied like ordinary matter. St Thomas Aquinas developed the doctrine of transubstantiation, drawing on concepts informed by classical Greek philosophy in order to counter mechanistic or crudely physical accounts of what occurs in the Eucharist.  In other words, we are dealing, here, with mystery and not magic; with faith and not physics.  Transubstantiation was and remains a guardrail against two errors:

• Attempts to reduce the mystery either to a crudely physical process;
• Alternative explanations of Christ's presence which understand him as being present ‘in, with and under’ the consecrated elements, as in some Christian traditions, or to purely symbolic interpretations that emerged in parts of the Reformation movement.

The term transubstantiation itself was already in theological use by the eleventh century and was employed dogmatically by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Aquinas did not invent the term but gave it its most influential philosophical exposition. To my knowledge, no subsequent account has matched the depth, clarity and enduring influence of his explanation of a mystery that ultimately transcends human words and concepts.