Signs & disguises: P. J. FitzPatrick, interviewed by Paul Baumann
SIGNS & DISGUISES Sorting out transubstantiation P. J. FitzPatrick & Paul Baumann PAUL BAUMANN: In Breaking of Bread: The Eucharist and Ritual (Cambridge, 1993)isafas-cinating and I think...
...This is philosophical skepticism, and once it gets going it's hard to stop...
...Aristotle insists on this, and so does Aquinas in commentary on him...
...Science can make mistakes, as any human activity can, but to make "material substances" inaccessible to it is to join the company of those who claim that we never really know what things are...
...In fact, some would say that it was "philosophical," not "scientific" at all...
...The mystery of the Incarnation embodies and fulfills this tradition...
...They show how human presence takes a special form in giving, and the role of the body here has been given its due...
...So it is with transubstantiation...
...We need to stop it at the start, by showing the emptiness of it...
...For Aristotle, such a change is accidental-the substance of the water is first qualified by the "accident" cold and then by the accident hot, baumann: Are all changes "accidental" for Aristotle...
...But our knowledge of the material world is now vastly different...
...We must learn to look at the eucharistic rite for what it is, and not attempt to reduce it to an ornamental flourish on a text which already says all that matters...
...The need to consume is endless, but nourishment cannot ward off death forever...
...This approach will lack the deceptive clarity of an account that insulates...
...Yes, what I am eating looks and tastes like chocolate, and I saw it being made from the usual ingredients...
...the meaning of the ritual of the Passover...
...Imagine a carafe of wine being left open until the wine becomes vinegar...
...We have a picture of some inner, invisible machinery, where components can be reshuffled by divine power...
...And those contexts must be respected...
...They too divorce appearance and reality...
...The ancient tradition of sacrifice is indeed shot through with darkness...
...I am trying to display ritual for what it is, not in terms of anything else...
...The way to light and life lies through Christ himself, who for our sake went down into death, facing in his own body the darkness of this world...
...In some changes, what we end up with is a different kind of stuff from what we began with...
...the central part of what he recited was in silence...
...In addition to In Breaking of Bread, he is the author of Apologia pro Charles Kingsley and Birth Regulation and Catholic Belief...
...According to transubstantiation, the accidents of the consecrated bread remain accidents, but are preserved in existence by divine power...
...they too confuse signs with disguises...
...FITZPATRICK: It misleads because it confuses signs with disguises...
...cares for us...
...For us to be nourished, the earth has had violence done to it-and yet violence must be contained if we are to survive...
...Watson for the first time that Watson has been in Afghanistan...
...Let me briefly say why...
...You just cannot treat Aristotle's terms like that and expect them still to make sense...
...But this picture has changed dramatically...
...fitzpatrick: Indeed it is not...
...Heat the water, and the two ends of the change are linked by substance...
...just as I never know what is in your mind, whether this penny will drop, whether anyone else exists...
...You might say I am trying to obey Wittgenstein's command to philosophers: not to say what it must be, but to look and see the Eucharist for what it is on its own terms...
...A sacramental theology should see the Eucharist, not in competition with our workaday knowledge, but as a cumulation of it, a use which respects the humble reality it transcends...
...This interview was conducted via the mails and intermittently working fax machines...
...It is not the "how it is" that matters, it is the coherence of the "it" itself...
...For him, "material substances" are what "no one on earth knows anything about...
...He says that the terms of the proposal do not hold together...
...We are concerned with the heart of our being and with its enlargement...
...Now, as Aquinas points out, the last things to be said by friends about to leave us are those that sink deepest into our hearts...
...The time-honored phrase "looks like bread, tastes like bread, but is not bread" makes as little sense as the skeptic's rumination over chocolate...
...It sums up what I am attacking: "But for myself," Newman writes of transubstantiation, "I cannot indeed prove it, I cannot tell how it is...
...just as much as the greatest philosophers, and that is nothing at all...
...Blood can be shed and life lost-and yet thereby our own lives and possibilities are sustained...
...A ritual meal is a communal acknowledgment of our needs, our abilities, our dependence on each other, our mutual trust...
...baumann: How so...
...FITZPATRICK: Precisely...
...And what strange company for an account of the Eucharist to be in...
...FITZPATRICK: By vulnerability I mean an acceptance of the church's past as both revered and unsatisfactory...
...an openness of the church to the whole of human activity and need, in which it can both learn and learn to minister...
...SIGNS & DISGUISES Sorting out transubstantiation P. J. FitzPatrick & Paul Baumann PAUL BAUMANN: In Breaking of Bread: The Eucharist and Ritual (Cambridge, 1993)isafas-cinating and I think important book...
...Your sense of the Eucharist's power and eloquence, and your suggestion that a more demanding engagement with the reformed rite may be the only way to help resolve antagonisms prevalent in the church today are compelling...
...BAUMANN: It's not an account that gives us what we expect nowadays from any scientific description of change...
...There is the famous Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes, with seemingly supernatural powers of intuition, concludes upon meeting Dr...
...What he wrote, the Old Mass exhibited...
...In what way does it mislead...
...I suggest that the cultic picture exhibited by the New Mass-which is much more a sign of the unity of the faithful in Christ-is at odds with the picture transubstantiation reflects...
...baumann: In what way...
...in that part, the words of consecration were set apart, typographically and posturally...
...No account of the Eucharist is acceptable that reduces it to a human memorial or an expression of fellowship...
...baumann: Explain...
...That is, in many of the newer accounts what is exalted is deemed to overwhelm and to replace what is humble...
...Those signs do not contradict Holmes's conclusion, they are a means to it...
...You are also dissatisfied with newer sacramental theologies put forth by theologians such as Luchesius Smits and Piet Schoonenberg and sympathetically criticized by Edward Schillebeeckx...
...Whatever you think of Aristotle's account of change, one thing in it must be grasped: the distinctions drawn between substance and accident, or between matter and form, must not be reified...
...we no longer have wine, we have vinegar...
...Let me cite you a passage about transubstantiation from Cardinal Newmann' s Apologia...
...our own makings of sense take place within this reality...
...We have got ourselves into a muddle, and we must start by getting out of it...
...a resolve to hold the ritual balance of past and present in a world that so needs it-the world for which Christ died...
...But in the Eucharist there is no link at all-the "whole substance" of the bread becomes the "whole substance" of Christ's body...
...They take terms from that tradition, and they abuse them to the point of nonsense...
...We confess that bondage to be more than illusion and misapprehension...
...But there are humble contexts where it works, and where words like "bread" and "wine" work...
...This is not mystery, it is a grotesque of our own devising...
...As I see it, this independent "life and direction" is one of the problems that goes with transubstantiation...
...fitzpatrick: Thank you...
...What's to hinder it...
...and the transcending of that ritual by Christ at the Last Supper...
...We have in the contrast between the Old Mass and the New Mass two cultic pictures, the older of which goes with insulation while the newer, I think, does not...
...FitzPatrick is emeritus reader in philosophy at the University of Durham, England...
...What we encounter in the Eucharist- body, blood, food, drink, death-is not accidentally encountered...
...the associations of a ritual meal...
...But it might not really be chocolate...
...And the Eucharist itself is given an essentially ritual and salvific setting: it is the fulfillment of the Passover, its mystery is a sign of the mystery by which we are members of Christ's body...
...What is amiss at Rome is far more than a matter of personalities: it is, yet again, insulation...
...The two collaborators only hope its substance and accidents hang together.nly hope its substance and accidents hang together...
...In Aquinas, for example, the language and ritual of sacrifice is an acknowledgment of what Aristotle called our doulephy-sis, our nature held in bondage...
...For Aristotle, this change is substantial...
...is in some strange way open and vulnerable to our love...
...It leads others, who write quite compellingly of the bestowal upon us of reality as a gift, as a mystery that both veils and reveals, to claim that the Eucharist forces us to acknowledge a distinction we do not normally make between appearance and reality...
...We must not try to explain away any such embarrassment...
...Briefly...
...The New Mass distributes roles, assigns different places to different actions in the liturgy, offers a wide range of Scripture to be read, and places the words of institution in the whole setting of the prayer of thanksgiving...
...It is the rite itself that is and must be what is primary...
...FITZPATRICK: Because transignification insulates the eu-charistic presence, just as the older accounts did...
...It is no surprise, for example, to find Aquinas writing that the essence of the Eucharist lies in the consecration of the matter, and that the sharing by the faithful is something subsequent...
...What needs to be embraced is vulnerability...
...But, for Aquinas and for us, it goes deeper...
...Forme, what scholastics write about the Eucharist is "Aristotelian" only in the sense that forged money is "money...
...For me, the trouble starts with what I have called "The Fallacy of Replacement...
...Your argument about the inadequacy and historically limited nature of the accepted accounts of transubstantiation is challenging...
...It is not an "account" of the Eucharist in the way the older and newer expositions are accounts...
...And so it is that the ambivalent associations that sacrifice encompasses-body, blood, food, drink, death-are united with the light shining in the darkness, with the work of the one who promises that, because he lives, we shall live also...
...Suppose we heat some water: what we end up with is the same kind of stuff as what we began with...
...This is a very odd argument indeed...
...And what goes with eating has an ambivalence that makes a meal a natural place for ritual...
...BAUMANN: You said that transubstantiation was "a misleading riddle...
...The pattern of ritual has a force of its own, and we must learn from it...
...He pays attention to things-signs, if you will-that less observant people overlook...
...Ritual is the whole point of the book...
...A sign does not compete with what it signifies, a disguise does compete with what it conceals...
...And why misleading...
...But it is not the obsoleteness of the scholastic terminology that worries me...
...Typically for these newer accounts, the redemptive place of Christ in the plan of salvation gives him the final word as to what things are...
...Eating itself shows our bodily dependence on the earth...
...Insulation is not an alternative...
...We cannot make divine power do duty for intelligibility...
...FITZPATRICK: Let me introduce my complaint by acknowledging the debt I owe to these and other recent authors...
...This kind of move is made by many defenders of transubstantiation: science can get no further than the accidental order, and so on...
...Consider two things that stand out today in the Roman church: a changed liturgy after the council and a pervasive discontent...
...BAUMANN: But surely the Eucharist is a mystery, and tran-substantiation admits as much...
...It can embody our awareness of God and our quest for him...
...They go down to the depths of our being...
...One way the darkness shows itself is the embarrassment we feel at eating and drinking the Lord's body and blood...
...It demands that we keep alive and yet keep in check a supremely important intuition: that a mystery confronts us, and that we have signs as we set out on the quest that is our response to the mystery...
...Is that why the scholastic account of the Eucharist, with its use of terms like "substance" and "accident," can no longer do justice to the eucharistic rite...
...The distinction between signs and disguises is further illuminated in a scene where Holmes pretends to be dying...
...Convenient in one way-the eucharis-tic presence can be insulated from all else-but the insulation is bought at the price of emptiness...
...This is not the point for me...
...comment and reflection must lead toward it, not develop a life and direction of their own...
...But it is a matter of where divine power is understood to be operating...
...The rite is inherited, handed down, and commanded to be carried out...
...These points, of course, are not wholly novel (Aquinas makes much of the last of them), but they have been displayed to advantage in the newer authors...
...And it insulates it by the same means-divorcing appearance from reality...
...The Way of Ritual does not eliminate the mystery...
...If Watson has been in Afghanistan, are you not heading for the Netherlands...
...Holmes does so on the grounds of certain things about Watson's appearance...
...BAUMANN: The subtitle of your book is "The Eucharist and Ritual...
...What do I know of substance or matter...
...P.J...
...BAUMANN: But surely the Eucharist involves divine power...
...Rome tends to speak a kind of monologue calling for a simple response of acceptance...
...The use of sacrificial language about Christ is inevitable...
...fitzpatrick: I have read widely in these and other Dutch and French sources, and-for what my opinion is worth-I do not think that the reality of the presence is compromised by them...
...fitzpatrick: Of course it does...
...Knowledge has indeed advanced since then...
...But the eucharistic adaptation of the distinctions is bound to turn them into dissections or component parts...
...A proper distinction between appearance and reality does not need "forcing on us"-we should not be alive if we were not intensely aware of it...
...Disguise has nothing to do with the Eucharist, skepticism about appearances has nothing to do with it, hidden machinery in the depth of the bread has nothing to do with it...
...Especially intriguing is your discussion of the Eucharist's sacrificial nature and how it embodies the "darkness" and ambivalences of the human condition...
...This permits some writers to conclude that empirical realities have "no more than a relative significance...
...on the contrary, it acknowledges the mystery by its very inadequacy...
...Paul Baumann is the associate editor of Commonweal...
...It deals with what no one on earth knows anything about, the material substances themselves...
...Does not your own rejection of transubstantiation force you in the direction of those accounts...
...But all that need concern us is the way it is used in a eucharistic setting...
...Creation itself is to be seen as a gift, a reality bestowed upon us, a revelation that both discloses and veils...
...Aquinas writes lucidly in one of his works about ancient riddles, "Could God make a square circle...
...In acknowledging that God could not make a square circle we do not have a lack of God's power, we have a lack of something possible...
...Indeed, I would add a command of my own: not to say what it might be, but live...
...It is not a matter of denying Christ the last word...
...But I say, 'Why should not it be...
...So the ritual of sacrifice can express, not only an acknowledgment of dependence, but a hope for sharing in what goes beyond the human condition, of which death must be the ending...
...BAUMANN: If transubstantiation can no longer guide us, what is the alternative...
...baumann: The doctrine of transubstantiation was part of an attempt to make speculation about the Eucharist intellectually respectable in the Middle Ages...
...it has no other choice...
...The altar served for all his activity...
...It takes terms devised to express change, and it puts them together in a way that makes no sense...
...And that is why, Aquinas goes on, Christ instituted the Eucharist on the night he was betrayed...
...Signs are not mufflings, they are manifestations...
...But the scholastic account of the Eucharist does away with such successive determinations or connections...
...fitzpatrick: No...
...But there is still more amiss in what Newman writes...
...fitzpatrick: Of course the Eucharist is a mystery, and if transubstantiation did no more than acknowledge the mystery I would not object...
...And sense-experience, like all other manifestations of human knowledge, is incomplete, relativized, and can mislead...
...They must not be turned into what I call dissections...
...BAUMANN: Why do you add that command...
...FITZPATRICK: Because I think it points to something better than the "insulation" I have criticized...
...fitzpatrick: First, a very brief account of what Aristotle says about change...
...And for me that makes no more sense than "dry water" or "the floor of the bottomless pit...
...To begin with, Newman's phrase "I cannot tell how it is," deflects our attention from the question he ought to be asking...
...The Old Mass gave silence to the congregation and an almost exclusive role to the priest...
...he had his back to the congregation...
...But interventions from Rome continue to exhibit the older cultic picture...
...These newer accounts often go by the name of "transignification...
...D The Rev...
...Why do you call this a fallacy...
...The scholastic tradition was indeed broadly Aristotelian, and it was in that tradition that people in the Middle Ages tried to make sense of the changes in the natural world around them...
...As he would put it, the matter, which was first determined by the substantial form of wine, is now determined by the substantial form of vinegar...
...But it does embody the belief that what lies beyond our darkness invites us...
...let the wine go sour, and the link is the matter...
...it is a matter of letting humble words mean the humble things they do...
...At this point, the claim is often advanced that sense-experience never reaches reality...
...The account is concerned with change in a single entity...
...we confess it to be a darkness that touches the very heart of our being...
...My objection to the new accounts is that, beneath all the differences in terminology, they are of a piece with the older...
...Holmes is careful not to let Watson near his bed, for fear that his mere disguise will be penetrated...
...There is the basic significance of eating in human life...
...That fallacy menaces much that is good in the new accounts...
...fitzpatrick: First, a riddle...
...BAUMANN: Isn't there a measure of truth in that...
...The older form of the Mass was a cultic picture that went with the kind of theological speculation found in Aquinas...
...The discontent is inevitable, as long as there is this gap between the practice of organization in the church and the picture exhibited by its celebration of the Eucharist...
...BAUMANN: Why a riddle...
...fitzpatrick: Yes and no...
...For better or worse, Aristotle has given an account of change in which something is determined first in one way and then in another: substance by its accidents, matter by its substantial forms...
...But it does far more...
...They have exhibited the complexity of presence for human beings, and how it goes beyond simple physical juxtaposition...
...But it is notorious that these accounts have been charged with compromising the reality of the eucharistic presence...
...And this concern is one that finds expression in sacrificial ritual and language...
...Signs here are clues to be followed, not disguises to be penetrated...
...The substance of Christ's body replaces the substance of bread under these accidents...
...That is why sacrificial ritual and language can go so deep into those who use them, deeper than the users can articulate...
...Transubstantiation is a misleading riddle...
...By moving along this "Way of Ritual," as I call it, we direct ourselves to the mystery of the eucharistic presence...
...it is not dividing that entity into component parts...
...Because it does this, it offers an appearance of sense that turns a mystery into a misleading riddle...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 2
