The Word and the Eucharist

Article: 04.10.18

Share: Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google Plus

“In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God and the Word was God”,

(Jn. 1:1) so begins the beautiful prologue of St. John’s Gospel, a favourite passage

of Fr. Holloway, a passage which places the Incarnation of the Eternal Word within the

context of creation rather than solely redemption. The Word is described as life, the life

that is the light of men, the supernatural life, which God, in His mercy, willed to share with

mankind irrespective of the fall, and which as a result of the fall became incarnate as the

“light which shines in the darkness”. It is a profound text in which St. John, soaring like an

eagle, gazes down from the heights of eternity at the humanity of the Incarnate Word and

the hope, the promise, that those who are made for Him might become one with Him as

co-heirs in His glory.

For centuries, this Johannine Prologue had acted as a kind of thanksgiving prayer at

Mass, firstly as a private devotion for the priest and then secondly as a corporate act

integrated into the liturgy.1 For Fr Holloway the removal of this prologue at the conclusion

of Mass was one of liturgical changes he lamented.2

This article will attempt to outline the thought of Fr Holloway on the theology of the

Eucharist, looking firstly at the significance for him of this Johannine prologue, secondly,

Holloway’s understanding of Christ as the Bread of Life and then finally presenting

Holloway’s proposed rephrasing of the doctrine of transubstantiation in a way that

accords with the revised metaphysical outlook necessitated by modern science.

Scientiific researchers

For Holloway, as for the Faith Movement, this Gospel passage encapsulates not only

the place of the Incarnation in the plan of God from eternity but also the Eucharist as

a truly integral part of this plan, something planned from the beginning as the glorious

culmination of God’s relationship with humanity on earth. The Universe is made for Christ, “He came to his own domain ”(Jn. 1:11), and being ordered towards the incarnation, the

very physical structures of the universe are ordered towards His advent, and to what

necessarily precedes Him- the earth, the ecosystem, less complex creatures, and finally,

man. Ideas elucidated by Holloway today find a certain parallel in the writings of certain

mainstream scientific researchers- observation has been made of how ‘deep structures’ in

the laws of the universe seem to necessitate a movement towards intelligent life,3 whilst

a large number of scientists have marvelled at the balance of material properties that are

rightly labelled as the ‘anthropic principle’.4

With the creation of man, his emergence in history according to the providence of

God, we find an enigma, a creature to whom

a physical environment alone can no longer

provide for his complete satisfaction, his

complete fulfilment. Man, being a bodysoul

composite needs to encounter Spirit,

uncreated Mind, the Eternal, the Uncreated

Logos in order to fully flourish, to have Life. At

the same time however, man is not pure spirit, he is not as the angels, he is a composite

and of necessity reaches out to God through his flesh, and through this bodily nature he

yearns to know God and speak with God and commune with God. “And the Word was

made flesh”, on account of the Almighty’s infinite charity He chose to take flesh, but in

doing so, He wills to fulfil the deepest desire of his creature man, “His own” whom He had

freely designed with this very thirst.

Vision

The vision of the Faith Movement on the place of Incarnation within the economy of God

is nothing more than a paraphrasing of the first Chapter of St. John, possibility the most

fitting of all Eucharistic meditations, for this Eternal Word Who is made flesh in the stable

at Bethlehem has been made present physically upon our altar, and now dwells amongst

us, is tabernacled amongst us.

The Incarnation and Holy Communion

The connection between the incarnation and the gift of Holy Communion at Mass is not

something strange or novel to the Faith Movement. The eucharistic writings of the saints

are also replete with references to the incarnation, the tie in between the fiat of the Blessed

Virgin Mary and the Hoc est Enim of the priest, and the silent worship of the blessed Virgin

during her pregnancy and the devout thanksgiving of Christian who worships the very same Lord only now within his breast rather than hers.5 The Word truly is our light and

our life, for whom we are made, or as He preferred to say, our daily bread, the Bread of

Life which a man may eat of and never die, the Bread which is His flesh given for the life

of the world.

Along with the opening chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the other great Eucharistic text

in the thought of Fr Holloway is the Bread of Life discourse found in John 6. In both of

Holloway’s published introductions to the Catholic Faith he spends a great amount of

time unfolding the riches of John 6 and the crucial importance it plays within Christology

as much as Sacramental Theology. Christ truly is our “bread”, the one for Whom we are

ordered, the heir of vineyard. had the fall of our first parents never occurred, Christ

would have still been Our Bread, that physical encounter with our environer for which we

are made, and in the order of His charity God would have still provided this Bread for us,

just as much as He would have still taken flesh in order to be our High Priest, our King and

our Divine Teacher. Human creatures, mind-body composites were always going to find

full-

flourishing only by means of a sacramental contact with their creator, in a contact that

befitted this two-fold nature. God in His Mercy and Wisdom freely chose to institute such

a sacramental economy even as He designed the nature of man as thirsting for this very

means of encounter.

Human existence

It is possible that such talk may strike the reader

as speculative or as a topic that belongs in the

universities of the thirteenth century, but this is

far from the truth. To acknowledge the intrinsic,

organic, union between the Eucharist, the

Incarnation, and even the creation of man (and not solely his fall), is to begin a powerful

apologetic on the nature of human existence, of the unchanging wisdom of the Divine

Logos and the absolute centrality of Holy Communion as THE means of life, supernatural

life, open to those in the state of grace. Holy Communion is that supernatural union

to which we have no entitlement and yet we are ordered towards according to the

gratuitous design of our creator. In this life here below, it is the union which anticipates

the consummate union in glory for all the elect.

“As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever

eats me will draw life from me.” (Jn.6:57), no part of this is symbolic. Unless the Eternal

Wisdom made flesh had intended for his words to be taken absolutely literally It would

have been impossible for Him to have uttered “my flesh is real food and my blood is real

drink”(Jn. 6:55), His Jewish context would not have allowed it. The Lord says that His flesh

is our food, in Greek, sarx, (σάρξ), the very same sarx that St. John tells us the Lord united

to Himself in the moment of His incarnation. Moreover, He tells us not merely to ‘eat’ His

flesh but to ‘chew’ or ‘gnaw’ it, in Greek Trogon (τρώγω), using graphic language which for

the Jews of his day could only have been taken as something either literally baffling or

metaphorically abhorrent. The disciples will only dare to consider His words within the

context of knowing that “You have the message of eternal life” (Jn.6:68), but it was surely

only in the context of professing “my Lord and my God”(Jn. 20:28) that they could begin to

fully grasp exactly what our Lord was offering, the beautiful invitation to a personal union

with Him through the means of matter.

Such was the view of the Early Church, one of the earliest witnesses, St. Justin Martyr

writes, “For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink; but as

Jesus Christ our Saviour being incarnate by God’s Word took flesh and blood for our

salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the Word of prayer

which comes from him, from which our flesh and blood are nourished by transformation,

is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus.”

Simplicity and clarity

St. Justin, with great simplicity and clarity points towards the sacred species and identifies

the Lord in His flesh and blood. The saint does not

speak to us of some invisible substance, he is claiming

something very matter of fact, just as Our Lord was,

using His graphic, physical language at the synagogue at

Capernaum. Here for Fr. Holloway is the starting point

of critique towards the Thomistic presentation of the doctrine of Holy Communion, he

writes, “When as a Thomist, I elevate the Host at the Consecration, do I see Christ? No,

I do not. [...] We see only the physical accidents of bread, but we know that the reality

which defines the totality is Christ. Nevertheless we do not see Christ ”.7 For Holloway

the faith of the Early Church,8 and indeed a faith expressed in the intuitions of the saints

and mystics,9 has been towards a ‘real presence’ more fleshy and more immediate than

the idea that Christ is present as the invisible substance enveloped by accidents of sight,

touch, taste, size, all miraculously suspended in existence by the omnipotence of God.10

Consider the language of St. Francis of Assisi as he writes, “Man should tremble, the world

should quake, all Heaven should be deeply moved when the Son of God appears on the

altar in the hands of the priest.”.11

While the Council of Trent does indeed state that at the moment of the consecration

“a conversion takes place of the substance of bread into the substance of the body of

Christ our Lord”12, that council did not wed itself to an Aristotelean-Thomistic framework

of substance/accidents. The word ‘substance’ in the Tridentine decree is combined with

‘species’ rather than ‘accidents’, and in doing so follows patristic writers who were not allied

to the hylomorphism of the scholastics.13 Today however the dominant philosophical

explanation of transubstantiation, where the doctrine is explained at all, is the Thomistic

one and yet this metaphysic doesn’t permit the faithful to speak of a “physical” presence

of Christ, a thought quite alien to the simple intuition faith.14,

Explaining

Fr Holloway offers us another manner of explaining

the literal, objective and abiding presence of

the very same Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament

and a way which allows us to speak of Christ as

being physically present, this is through seeing

the sacramental presence of Christ as the continuation of His human nature under a

sacramental manifestation, he writes, “It is suggested that the entire reality of the material

amalgam of ‘bread’ and ‘wine’ becomes the Body and Blood of Christ, i.e. the human nature

of the Word made flesh, in the same substantial sense as the existing theory, but that

there do not remain the physical accidents of bread and wine, the external reality attained

by the senses is as much the Body and Blood of the Lord as the substance in the theory

of St. Thomas, the appearances of bread and wine are the sacramental manifestation and

expression of the human nature of Jesus Christ, and as much the ‘accidents’ of his human

nature as were the manifestations of his form and figure when he walked on earth.”15,

Physically present

It must be admitted that Holloway reaches this conclusion not solely through exegesis

and a study of the Fathers but also as a result of his re-consideration of the Aristotelian-

Thomistic metaphysics in the light of modern science, developments which necessarily

must affect our understanding of nature, substance, matter and form.16, Although the

majority of Thomistic thinkers have endeavoured to maintain the ‘old synthesis’ alongside

an acceptance of the new science, Fr. Michael Chaberek however, in his recent book,

“Aquinas and Evolution” has cogently argued that the findings of modern science,

and in particular the theory of evolution, have very strong implications towards the

framework of St. Thomas. Although it must be admitted, Chaberek chooses to side with

the philosophy of Aquinas rather than the findings of modern science, he is nonetheless

very aware that the philosopher is necessarily faced with a choice between the Thomistic

distinctions of act/potency, matter/form, substance/accidents and the philosophical

underpinnings of evolution which, for example, requires accidental changes over time

of being able to produce what Thomas would call a new ‘substantial form’.17 If the animal

and plant ‘substances’ are no longer understood as fixed and directly created by God at

the beginning of creation 6000 years ago (as Aquinas taught) but are capable of a gradual

emergence or radical changes the concepts of substance/accident, form/matter and act/

potency falter in their utility and meaningfulness.18

Recognised

Holloway recognised and named this

challenge seventy years ago, and he offered

an alternate, ‘new synthesis’, a view radically

anti-nominalist, and yet reconciled with a

universe in flux in which all change is, as

it were, substantial.19 Holloway’s vision is

outlined implicitly in his major work but

explicitly in his Perspectives in Philosophy series. Under Holloway’s revised metaphysics we

see the ‘transubstantiated’ host as Christ, but we no longer speak in terms of substance

and accidents, instead we say that Christ’s human nature, His flesh, has been ‘extended’

in a new eucharistic manner so as to be our food, so as to fulfil His unique mission as the

life for our souls, his divinity is presence by concomitance.20

Contact

Christ truly desires a contact with us that allows Him to be our food, literally, as He taught

in His Bread of Life discourse. In describing Our Lord as working such great a wonder,

we are not in any way suggesting that the Lord becomes re-incarnate as bread,. It is the

same human nature of Christ that we each encounter, intimately and personally. Nor

does Christ, according to His human nature, undergo any physical pain at the moment

of the fractio, or if His sacred body is maltreated, for it is the risen Lord, impassible and

subtle in His glorified Human nature, the same Lord Who appeared in the upper room

while the doors were still closed.

Blessed Sacrament

As Fr. Stephen Boyle put it in an earlier Faith Magazine article on this subject, “We do

indeed need to avoid that “naive realism” which claims per impossibile that the Sacred

Host acts and reacts in the way Jesus’ body did when walking in Palestine... But to avoid

this we should not and do not need, we suggest in this piece, to deny in any way Christ’s

actual physical identity to the intrinsic bread-like properties of the Blessed Sacrament, as

prominent scholasticism seems to do. We will argue that we do actually see Jesus upon

the altar, but not that He physically winces in pain at the fractio.”21

Eucharistic Congress

Christ remains with us as our teacher speaking through His infallible magisterium, He

continues as our healer through the powers of absolution and unction, He renders

propitiation for our daily offences through the Mass, and, just as permanently, He remains

with us as our food, our physical contact with Him, affording us no less of a relationship

with Him than was the experience of the twelve. St. Clement of Alexandria beautifully

writes- “The Word is everything to a child: both Father and Mother, both Instructor and

Nurse. ‘Eat My Flesh,’ He says, ‘and drink My Blood.’ The Lord supplies us with these

intimate nutrients. He delivers over His Flesh, and pours out His Blood; and nothing is

lacking for the growth of His children. O incredible mystery!”,22

As our country celebrates the national Eucharistic Congress, Fr Holloway reminds us

that the one Whom we look at in the monstrance is a “He” not an “It”, here is Jesus, the

same Jesus, physically here before us. “All things were created through him and for him”

(Col 1:16), may the whole of creation render Him glorious praise, Its King, Its Lord, made

flesh in Bethlehem and abiding with us forever in the tabernacles of our churches.

Notes:

Father Mark Higgins is a priest of the diocese of Southwark.

Share:Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google Plus

Faith Magazine

September - October 2018

Download Subscribe

The Faith Vision

Editorial: 10.11.22

Share: Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google Plus

The Church refused to engage with modern science. The Second Vatican Council explained the urgent need to do so.

The Faith Movement: a time of renewal

Article: 01.09.22

Share: Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google Plus

The Faith Movement has a joyful understanding of God and the mission of the Church, seeing Christ as the Lord of History and recognising that He has a special call to men and women of each era, including our own.