Per Caritatem

In chapter three of Denys Turner’s book, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, he has a short, yet dense section devoted to explicating St. Thomas’ Eucharistic theology of presence and absence vis-à-vis Zwingli’s teaching on the Eucharist.  As Turner explains, Roman Catholic theology distinguishes “between the material reality of the signifier and the formal character of the sign precisely as signifying” (p. 63).  The sign in its formal character “signifies the body and blood of Christ … in so far as they are ‘absent’, where ‘absence’ is defined by contrast with the material presence of the sign itself; and so, in so far as by signifying the body and blood of Christ the appearances of bread and wine make them present in one way, they do so only in so far as in another, that is, in the manner in which the sign itself is present, they are absent” (p. 63).  In other words, on this particular point, both Thomas and Zwingli agree, viz., Christ is not present locally in the Eucharist in the same way in which the bread and the wine are present in this place at this time.  For example, Thomas writes, “it is evident that Christ’s body does not begin to be present in this sacrament by local motion. First of all, because it would follow that it would cease to be in heaven” (ST 3a q75, a2, corp.).  Thomas of course, in contrast with Zwingli, also states that the bread and the wine are not mere signs signifying the body and blood of Christ. Rather, according to Thomas, Christ is present sacramentally.[1]  According to Turner, Zwingli’s account leans heavily toward a Eucharistic theology of absence, for in Zwingli’s view the very nature of a sign displaces the reality of which it signifies; hence, the sign (bread and wine) is really present, which means that the signified (Christ) is really absent.  Thomas, however, wants to stress both the real presence and absence of Christ.  As Turner explains, for Thomas

sacramental signs constitute a set of special cases, in which the conditions of absence follow not as such from the nature of signs but from the nature of a sacrament, and in the very special case of the Eucharist the necessity of Christ’s absence does not exclude the real presence of Christ, but rather lays down conditions for the description of that real presence.  For Thomas, therefore, if you are going to say that Christ is ‘really present’ in the Eucharist, your account of the word ‘real’ is going to have to begin from the fact that he cannot be there as in that place (localiter), because he is raised and ascended to the Father in heaven (p. 64). 

Turner goes on to add that three conditions for the word ‘real’ with regard to real Eucharistic presence follow from Thomas’ starting point: (1) Christ is not present in the Eucharist “as he was in his pre-mortem existence”; (2) “though it is the risen Christ, ascended into heaven, who is present in the Eucharist, Christ is not there as, in the kingdom, he will be seen by us at the right hand of the Father”; (3) the Christ who is present in the Eucharist must be numerically one and the same Christ who walked the shores of Galilee and who is now seated at the right hand of the Father (p. 64). 

Given the conditions laid down in (1)-(2), for Thomas, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist must be a bodily presence; however, Christ’s bodily presence in the sacrament is “neither in the natural condition as known to Peter and James and John two thousand years ago, nor as they now know him in his and their condition as raised in the beatific vision of heaven” (p. 65).  Here Turner makes a fascinating connection between Thomas’s Eucharistic theology of presence and absence and negative theology:

the core problem for Thomas’s account of the Eucharist is the problem of how the future-the kingdom of our communication with the risen Christ, the resurrection-can be bodily present now to us, given our fallen and failing, as yet unraised, powers of bodily communication and given his raised and totally communicating body.  And that problem of how the raised person of Jesus is present in the body to us in our as yet unraised bodies just is the problem of how to do a ‘negative theology’ of the Eucharist.  The need for a negative theology arises out of Eucharistic exigencies (p. 65). 

Stay tuned for part II…

Notes

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[1] “Christ’s body is not in this sacrament in the same way as a body is in a place, which by its dimensions is commensurate with the place; but in a special manner which is proper to this sacrament. Hence we say that Christ’s body is upon many altars, not as in different places, but ‘sacramentally’: and thereby we do not understand that Christ is there only as in a sign, although a sacrament is a kind of sign; but that Christ’s body is here after a fashion proper to this sacrament, as stated above” (ST 3a q75 a1 ad3; emphasis added).